Automatic contact sheets?

December 16, 2008 12:11 PM

I have to create a bunch of contact sheets (actually like 600) of photos in different directories. This sounds like it should be easy, but of course there's...

"Automatic" is the solution I'm looking for :-)

For years, I have been using the Automate>Web Photo Gallery function is various versions of Photoshop to create these photo galleries. On my local drive’s backup for the website, I have around 600 directories/folders of photos (each directory containing anywhere up to 100 photos, but the average will be about 30).

They are very organized. All the folders are located in the following directory structure:

…members\Galleries\Gallery001\
…members\Galleries\Gallery002\
…members\Galleries\Gallery003\
up to
…members\Galleries\Gallery600\

A typical GalleryXXX folder contains:
images (folder)
pages (folder)
thumbnails (folder)
index.html

I need to make hard-copy contact sheets for the contents of all 600 “thumbnails” folders located at:

…members\Galleries\GalleryXXX\thumbnails\


Each of the contact sheets must only have one directory’s images on it, although each contact sheet can have multiple pages. Each image must also be labeled with it’s filename somewhere near or on it.


The “contact sheet” option in the Windows Vista explorer photo wizard works great (I pick “ADOBE PDF DISTILLER” as the printer, but I’d have to do it 600 times, name each one… ) so other software options are being looked for.

Since the directory structure is so regular, and the actions needed are so regular, there has GOT to be an automated way for me to generate something like contactsheet001.pdf through contactsheet600.pdf automatically.

Any thoughts?

Oh, I have PhotoshoCS2, Illustrator CS2, Acrobat Pro 6 Available if that helps, but Im not married to using those programs.

Thanks in advance!!

posted by sandra_s to computers & internet (6 comments total)

If all else fails, this should be a very short perl script. Perl has pretty good support for making PDF documents. You might also be able to use perl to generate a LaTeX file for including the photos, which you could then turn into a PDF.
posted by devilsbrigade at 12:39 PM on December 16, 2008

Dear devilsbrigade: Any details on that? :-)
posted by sandra_s at 12:45 PM on December 16, 2008

Use imagemagick to make one big image from all the thumbnails, and print that.

Use a shell script to descend the directory paths and invoke the imagemagick command.

The imagemagick command is pretty much "montage --tile *.jpeg montage.jpg", but see here for more options.
posted by orthogonality at 12:58 PM on December 16, 2008

PDF::API2 for directly making PDFs. This could be tricky to get set up & working though, and would take a decent amount of possibly tricky playing to get the formatting right. Its a more direct solution though. The perl script would go to each directory with a thumbnails subdir, get a list of all the thumbnails, & then figure out where to put each one. You'd have to worry about paging & where exactly each thumb goes, which is why I'd probably recommend LaTeX.

With LaTeX, I'd try either a tabular environment or a multicol layout for getting the contact sheet look, & importgraphics with the graphicx package for scaling & importing (png, jpg, etc. work fine if you use pdftex). If neither of those layout options work, subfloats are probably the most correct way: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions has the details and examples. The perl script would go to each directory with a thumbnails subdir, grab all the thumbnail file names & make an \importgraphics block for each, insert all of those into an existing .tex template you write, then call pdftex with an appropriate output filename.
posted by devilsbrigade at 1:06 PM on December 16, 2008

Ok, is there a way, other than learning a new language? Im not ungrateful for the suggestions so far, but I'm looking for efficiency. I think that by time i figure out perl or LaTeX, i could have just manually generated the contact sheet pdfs through Windows Vista Picture wizard.

:-)
posted by sandra_s at 4:47 PM on December 16, 2008

Honestly, advertise for a script on craigslist. As I said above, it's a shell script that recursively descends your directories and calls imagemagick's montage. Offer $50 for the script (which is too much, but by the time the guy walks you through installing imagemagick, it's probably fair).
posted by orthogonality at 7:40 PM on December 16, 2008