All of us who produce museum quality photographic prints need a way to maintain our wide format printers when we are away on shooting trips. When these printers sit idle, their print heads dry up and eventually require costly replacement. They need to print daily to stay in good working order. Only a very small print using all colors is necessary.

Does anyone know of a Photoshop plugin that can automate a small print order and send it to the printer every 24 hours? This would of course require first waking the computer from sleep mode, then sending the print order from Photoshop, via the Epson or Canon driver (also plugins).

This is such a critical issue that I would even be willing to pay someone to write the necessary code to create such a plugin. I work on Mac OS with Epson printers.

Here is an interesting excerpt from a review of the Epson 9000 printer in which the reviewer mentions a freeware he uses for this purpose. However the freeware is only written for Windows:

"Despite what you might read elsewhere, this printer will not wake itself to do scheduled cleanings (confirmed with Epson). That's a huge drawback for a professional photographer like myself who is routinely gone for a month at a time. To prevent the print head from drying, I use the freeware Irfanview to do an automated small daily print that exercises the nozzles."

Any referrals or ideas for how to automate a daily print using Mac OS would be greatly appreciated.