Digital Contact Sheets

[anerjee]

Looking for some suggestions or creative ideas to create digital contact sheets.

After shooting, I process and scan each roll into a separate folder. I have 500+ such folders, and looking for a specific image is becoming hard, despite diligent Keywording. My main tool is Lightroom.

So I was wondering how to create a digital contact sheet -- 1 picture per folder containing all files in the folder, like a contact sheet. The individual pics should have sufficient resolution for me recognize one while viewing the entire sheet. I'm hoping this can make the pics more traceable.

Lightroom has a way to do contact sheets, but it is manual and laborious. Does anyone have a better method?

 

[Vince Lupo]

Have you tried Adobe Bridge? Whenever a client asks me to do a contact sheet, I use Bridge. Very easy, and you can scale up or down the size of the image, how many to a page etc.

 

[x-ray]

Bridge is ok but Qimage is the best I've seen. It's a RIP software and quite cheap. Unfortunately it's only for Windows. I normally run Mac's in my work but keep an old XP windows machine to run my printers and have Qimage on it. I see no reason it wouldn't run on a Mac using boot camp or parallels and windows.

 

[Photo_Smith]

I use Bridge or contact sheet II in Photoshop; you might have to download the latter from Adobe, as in their wisdom it isn't included in the install.

 

[anerjee]

I use Bridge or contact sheet II in Photoshop; you might have to download the latter from Adobe, as in their wisdom it isn't included in the install.

Thanks, Contact Sheet II seems to be the ticket. The other option is to use a ImageMagick script, but that seems not straightforward.

 

[robert blu]

I do not find LR so laborious once you have prepared in the develop modul a preset and save it for future use. I made a preset with three column and 6 row (18 pictures) and on two pages I have a complete roll. Of course it is easier when you use LR and all your photos (scans) are imported in it. Just my idea, regards.
robert