Combining 2-4 jpeg files on the desktop making one new file to print

You can skip the screenshot step, Preview will put them on one sheet for you. Select the 2–4 pictures on the desktop and press Command-O. They should open together in one Preview window with thumbnails down the side (View > Thumbnails if that strip isn't showing). That's probably where your first picture "disappeared" to as well: it went into that strip instead of a window of its own. If they open in some other app, right-click one and use Open With > Preview.

Then choose File > Print, scroll down to Layout and set Pages per Sheet to 2 or 4. The preview on the left of the print window shows how they'll land on the page before anything prints, so you can try both.

— Dmitry · developer of ComfortFiles

If you happened to have a current version of imagemagick installed, you can take your 2 - 4 input images, rescale them to a specific size, stack them vertically using the append command and then pipe that result to standard output and open in Prevew:

magick image1.jpeg image2.jpeg image3.jpeg image4.jpeg -resize 800x600! -append JPG:- | open -f -a Preview

Then print from Preview. Here is the result using three different size jpeg images as input:

If you don't have imagemagick installed, then the simplest approach is using the free GIMP, or free Affinity v3 tools.

I'm unaware of any built-in feature that would have ever done that. You'll need to use an image tool like Pixelmator for something like that.

DmitryRyzhkin wrote:

— Dmitry · developer of ComfortFiles

What's this? Another developer who's read the Terms of Use forbidding links to one's own apps?

Well I'm not the developer of ComfortFiles! So here's a link to that cool-looking utility!