Other than ensorcelling by way of a genie, are there any other ways to temporarily control sims outside of the active household?

I don't want to switch active households. I'm concerned about story progression kicking in for my family, if I switch away too long.

Correct, Selector is just a shortcut for switching actives. The short answer is no, I don't think so. Unless you count using NRaas Traveler to take inactives (friends) on a vacation with you, then you have the choice of controlling them during the trip or not and they return to their original households after it's over. But that's way overkill if you just wanted one of them to pick up after themselves or only control them for a short time.

One way to prevent the households we are playing from running away from us on progression related actions while we are switching into others is to use NRaas SP and leverage its caste settings to prevent unwanted forms of progression in our absence. For those of us who use Option One, we do have to remember to flip the soon to be inactive household into the protected caste and then take them out again when we return. There are other variations on this that manage the process a bit more automatically.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+P...+Caste+Settings

If one doesn't use or want to use NRaas SP, there may be an AwesomeMod way to achieve something similar but not sure about this.

I already use NRaas SP, so I'll look into those setting you mentioned.

I'm trying to set up a town farmer who sells his produce using Ani's produce stand mod; but when sims harvest while outside of the family, they don't keep the items (unless I'm remembering incorrectly, as it's been some time). Originally, I was going to just try using the genie's Ensorcel interaction. However, I can't get the interaction to work while using NRaas Portrait Panel. The temporary control is so that I can tell the sim to garden AND have him also keep his harvest.

Getting them to harvest when inactive may be one thing, but preventing them from magically selling off the produce should be another.

SP > Sim (Household, Caste, Town) Options > Money:Allow Inventory Management > False might lock things in, though possibly the harvestables will then keep getting shifted to family inventory.

The more global setting but restricted to produce would be SP > General Options > Options:Money > Options:Sales > Sell Inventory Fruits and Veg, but that one affects all sims in town.
(SP Money add-on module required for both of these settings)

Not sure how to entice an inactive to sell their wares on the Produce Stand or if that can be done without controlling them, though.

I've wanted this for sometime, unfortunately my search didn't turn up anything either. I wanted to make a small business by a painter to paint portraits for people, and my sims to be able to go that artist and be painted by them. Too bad there's no "ask to paint me" option.

I wish there was some easy way to get huge portrait of your sim without going into SimPE and recoloring something ):.

There is. Thanks to Douglasviega...

http://www.modthesims.info/d/579394 is the Poster set studio
http://www.modthesims.info/d/579395 is the loader.

Take a screenshot of the painting you want. (As straight ahead and level as possible, and as close as you can get. Edit as needed)
Make a poster of your painting
Put it in the biggest frame.

It's not going to appreciate in value like the original, but it would be a large painting of your sim.

Ohh that is quite nice. Yes.. Though I'd still like to make use of my artist sim, this is a valid work around. And I can make use omsp to change size of poster. Thanks Ghost.

If you want a smaller picture, you can use one of the smaller frames. I mentioned using the large one because you sais you wanted it to be huge.

http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...6&postcount=108 shows the size that the large frame produces. (Which would qualify as "huge")