FINALLY
it fucking
it finally fucking worked.
finally
fucksake, why . why are printers so goddamn awful.
turns out
none of the pictures were corrupted. it just decided, randomly, that if I tried to print all of them, you know, so I wasn't sat there for ages doing each page of four individually, it would just send a few lines of ascii garbage instead and waste like eight sheets of paper on this bullfuck before it would jam and crash the printer.
but the moment I fucking select just a small number, send THOSE to print, wait for it to spool up, wait for it to slowly print them all, then wind down, then select a new batch, having to set up the print options EACH AND EVERY TIME I DID SO, more than doubling the time this takes, it printed out all of them JUST. FINE.