If you have carefully calibrated printer presets on OS X and you want to transfer them to a new computer, or reinstall your operating system and restore them, Apple makes it much more difficult than it needs to be.
For macOS Sierra, suggestions you find online — to run killall on cfprefsd, to remove and reinstall printers, etc. — are either out-of-date or never worked originally. Here is the only method I’ve found that works.
- Make copies of every plist file in in ~/Library/Preferences/ that begins with the prefix com.apple.print.
- Set up your new computer.
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Open System Preferences from the Apple Menu, choose “Printers & Scanners”, and Control-click on the “Printers” panel at the left. That will bring up a “Reset printing system…” option. Select that, confirm, then close System Preferences.
- Copy all your plist files to your new ~/Library/Preferences/ directory.
- Open System Preferences to the printer setttings again, and press the + button in the left panel to add each of your printers.
- You will probably need to reboot your new Mac to make sure the changes propagate to all services.
Your presets should now work as before.
Excellent! Worked like a charm. Thanks!
Glad it helped!
What about if I go to ~/Library/Preferences/ and I can’t see any files that begins with the prefix com.apple.print? Would they be saved somewhere else perhaps?
They could be in /Library/Preferences/
can’t find it
This worked brilliantly for me too, didn’t have to restart new MacBook for it to take effect either.
thanks.
Unfortunately, this did not work for me :( (I have an Epson R2000). I primarily use my Epson for printing archival reproductions of illustrations for my work, so every time I’ve installed a new computer I’ve lost all of my printing presets. It’s a major headache to try and estimate the color settings by eye, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. This was a good idea, though, and I’ll keep it in mind if I ever switch to another printer!
Oh, that’s unfortunate! Do you mind telling me your macOS version? I may need to update the instructions.
Sure thing! I’m on Mac High Sierra. Thanks :)
Oddly enough, I tried this on 3 different macs and it didn’t work on any of them. All of them have High Sierra. Any thoughts on other ways to accomplish the task? Thank you.
Andrew