What a contact sheet is for
A contact sheet is the page you look at before choosing: every frame from a shoot, small, whole and in order, with enough written under each one to find the file again. A photographer marks it up for a client; a family sorts a box of scans with it; a shop checks every product shot on one table before any of them goes live. What matters is that nothing is cropped and nothing is out of order.
- Whole photographs. Each sits inside its cell at its own shape, so a portrait is never trimmed to match the landscape beside it.
- A line of text under each. Number, file name and pixel size, set in the same typeface as this page, cut short with an ellipsis rather than run into the next cell.
- Tray order, page after page. The order you opened them in is the order they are printed in, and the same folder always produces the same pages.
Pages, and changing your mind
The first page is a template. Fill pages from the tray chunks the whole set into as many copies of it as the photographs need, and replaces the pages in one step, so changing the grid to five across and filling again is two presses and one undo away from where you were. A page can still be worked on by hand afterwards — swap two photographs, merge two cells for a hero frame — without touching the others.
The page size is the board size: letter and A4 are both in the list, at 300 DPI. The PDF places each sheet at exactly that paper size, so printing it at 100% gives the size you set.
A contact sheet here is a picture of your photographs, not an archive of them. The labels are text drawn into the image — they are not selectable or searchable in the PDF — and the file names come from the files you opened, which never leave this device.
Asked and answered
How many photographs go on one sheet?
Twenty to start with — four across and five down on an upright page, the other way round on a landscape one. That is a size where a face still reads at arm's length on letter or A4 paper. Change the rows and columns under Grid and press Fill pages from the tray to re-cut the whole set at the new count.
What does the line under each photograph say?
A running number, the file name, and the photograph's pixel size — or just the number, or number and name, if you prefer. Numbers run across pages, so the first photograph on page three carries on from the last one on page two.
Are the photographs cropped?
No. A contact sheet shows every photograph whole inside its cell, so a portrait and a landscape sit side by side at their own shapes. Switch Inside each cell to Fill if you want an even wall of tiles instead; the labels stay.
Can I keep a logo or a title card on every sheet?
Put it in a cell and lock the cell. When the pages are filled from the tray, a locked cell repeats on every page and the rest of the tray flows around it.
How do the sheets leave?
As one PDF with a page per sheet at the paper size you chose, or as a ZIP of PNG, JPEG or WebP files named in page order. Both are assembled in the browser tab and saved straight to your downloads.
