Techniques are disclosed for performing processing, such as striping, staggering, and stitching, on print data prior to printing by a multi-head printer. Subsets of the print data may be stored in multiple stages of buffers and processed in parallel to increase processing efficiency. Print data representing digital photographs may be processed sufficiently rapidly to enable continuous printing of digital photographs at high speeds. Parameters of the system, such as print buffer size and interrupt frequency, may be varied in response to design requirements such as overall system cost.