Cloud Printer for Mac OS X 10.7 (and above)

By Somasundaram M   (2011)

This application, downloadable from Mac App Store, allows you to send a print job to your Google Cloud Print enabled printer from your Mac. You can even specify most of the print options supported by your Google Cloud Print enabled printer after buying the In-App purchase through the Mac App Store. This tool also lists the jobs that have been printed to this printer so that you could track them.

Cloud Printer 1.x.x users: Please download version 2.x.x from Mac app Store. It contains support for new version of Google Cloud Print. Read below for more details.

Virtual Printer using a proxy solution
To make the application be useful in more use-cases, a new solution has been created. This will allow users to use the 'Cloud Printer' program even from Adobe software that do not like the use of OS X's PDF Service. After downloading and installing 'Cloud Printer' from Mac App Store, please install this software and follow these steps:

  1. Download this package (now with support for macOS Mojave) - PrintProxyDistribution.Signed.pkg
  2. Open 'Finder' and navigate to the directory, typically ~/Downloads directory, where you will find a PrintProxyDistribution.Signed.pkg file.
  3. Double-click the 'PrintProxyDistribution.Signed.pkg' installer to install the print proxy companion software and the Google-Cloud-Printer virtual printer.
  4. The installer will prompt for the administrator password to create the operations of copying the print proxy software and for creating the virtual printer.
  5. If the above process completes successfully, you should be able to print using any application and find a 'Google-Cloud-Printer' in the print dialog as a printer.

Automator way to use the application
Although the automator based approach was the recommended way of using 'Cloud Printer' application, we recommend users to use the more powerful Virtual Printer method described above. You can also use automator to create a print-plugin and use this application from most application's print dialog. Here is a step-by-step Guide to setup an automator based integration into Print Dialog:

  1. Open Automator in Mac
  2. Click 'Print Plugin'
  3. Ensure that 'Actions' tab has been selected in 'Automator'
  4. In the search box in Automator, enter 'Open Finder Items' (please translate this to your local language if English is not the language used in your Mac)
    • You could optionally use several actions in the "PDFs" subsection and select any of the PDF transformation that is required for your workflow. Please see below for more details.
  5. If you 'double click' on the 'Open Finder Items' in the list of 'Actions', it will add that action to the plugin being created.
  6. On the right half of the Automator program (where there is a visual flow graph of the plugin being created) and in the 'Open Finder Items' action, select 'Cloud Printer' that you have installed in your Mac in the 'Open With' option.
  7. Now, save your plugin with a name of your choice typically indicating 'Print using Cloud Printer'.

Now, you can print from most Mac applications using the Cmd+P button and it will bring up the Mac Print Dialog. Typically, on the left bottom corner of the Print Dialog, there will be a drop-down list box with the default text 'PDF'. Please click that option and select the plug-in that you have just created. This will send the print job to the 'Cloud Printer' program from which you will able to select the Google-Cloud-printer/print-service/Googl­eDrive that you would like to print to.

More ways of using Cloud Printer with Automator

There are many interesting workflows that can be enabled by making use of the various Automator actions before using 'Open Finder Items' action to send the print job to this applications. One could

Please watch the video walthrough of the process below in HD.
The file here contains three *.workflow files that should be copied into users's "~/Library/PDF Services" directory which will provide three automator scripts to print using this Cloud Printer program.

If you encounter problems in Automator not launching the application correctly, please execute this command in your terminal window.

ln -s /Applications/Cloud\ Printer.app/Contents/MacOS/Cloud\ Printer ~/Library/PDF\ Services/Print\ using\ Cloud\ Printer


Other ways to use the application
Please note that the file formats that can be supported will be limited. At the moment, atleast PDF/TXT/JPEG/PNG files and Microsoft Office Document/Presentation/Spreadsheet files are known to work.

Minimum Requirements:
Intel 64-bit Mac OS X >= Lion 10.7
2.7MB of free Hard disk space.

Download:

  This application is exclusively distributed through the Mac App Store from version 2.0 onwards. One will be able to submit print jobs to their Google Cloud Printer after modifying the print settings.

Download latest version from Mac App Store

Release Notes: