Printing – How to Add a User to Print Administrator Group Without Full Admin Rights

You can grant users partial admin rights (printers only) by making them members of the _lpadmin group. This is a hidden system group, so it doesn't appear in the Accounts preference pane; you have to grant membership from the command line (as a real admin). You can do this for an individual user:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a fred _lpadmin

or just add everyone:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -t group -a everyone _lpadmin

BTW, membership in _lpadmin grants both the ability to manage queues, and also configure printer settings; if you just want to grant queue management (e.g. resuming queues), I believe you can do that by adding people to _lpoperator instead.

I don't think there's a way to do this on a per-user-account basis, but you can do it per-computer. The reason for this is that printer admin rights are controlled by membership in the _lpadmin group, which is a local group on each computer. Since it's a local group, membership is controlled locally.

I can give you two ways to do it: first, change the _lpadmin group on all the computers to make everyone with an account (local or network) a member:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a staff -t group _lpadmin

Second, you could create a network group (I assume you're using Open Directory network/mobile accounts?) and make everyone in that group a member of _lpadmin:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a netprinteradmin -t group _lpadmin

Unfortunately, either of these would have to be run on each Mac individually. If you have Apple Remote Desktop set up to admin the Macs, you could use its Sent Unix Command feature to push either command to all computers with a single operation...