Naming Printers

If you have several printers on your network, it can sometimes be difficult to know which one is which. But you can name your printers to make it easier. Names will carry over to other users on your Mac, but not to other Macs or devices on your network.

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Video Transcript: So today when you buy a printer it's a lot different than it was years ago. We all have WiFi networks and a lot of printers today have WiFi connections. So you're very quickly and easily hooking your printer up to your entire network. If you have a large family and you have several printers and computers it can be very confusing when you go to print something you may see several printers in the print list. I only have one here. It's all I've got. But you can easily see several and they can be from the same manufacturer and even have similar names. So it can be confusing as to which one you're printing to.
Fortunately, you can name your printers. The place you do that is in System Preferences. So go to System Preferences to Printers and Scanners. Here you'll find a list of your printers on the left. You've probably been here before maybe when you've added new printers or something. Here you can see my printer. It's not even online. It's not going to change the fact that I can name it.
I'm going to, in order to name it, Control click on it. You can see I've got several options. One is to set the default printer. So I can set my default printer for my computer here. But I can also rename the printer. So I'll rename it to something I'll remember and I'll know this is the one that I want to go to. 
Now you can see the name is changed there. When I switch back to TextEdit here and I go to print you can see I get that printer there named. So I didn't even have to have it online. It's not actually telling the printer you've got a new name. It's just renaming the printer here in my system. 
Now you should know that while this name is changed for this user on this computer and it seems to change for the other users on this computer as well, it's not going to change the name, of course, for other Macs on your network. Because it's not actually changing the name of the printer itself it's just changing, kind of, the nickname that this computer calls it. So you can call it one thing and somebody on another computer in the household can call it something different if they want. Which call actually be a useful feature.

Comments: One Response to “Naming Printers”

Narelle

7 years ago

EVERY time i watch something (even tho i think i know how to do it) I learn something new. I have been meaning to change my "printer default" to my new printer, but didnt know where to go. THANK YOU again for being so clear, direct, concise, and quick with our instructions.

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Naming Printers

Comments: One Response to “Naming Printers”

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