Images to thumbnail gallery for physical flashcards?

November 24, 2022 2:56 AM

I'm a teacher. I need to make picture cards every day. Resizing images to fit on a page really slows me down. I just want to go from a clipped area of the screen and get that into a flashcard template that can quickly be printed. Perhaps there's a way to just print a lot of images directly from a filesystem directory into a pdf of large thumbnails, maybe 6 per A4 page, that I can then print?

Canva: When you paste in an image, it doesn't fit inside the selected box. Too slow.

Apple Pages: When you paste in an image from the clipboard, the table resizes instead of the image scaling to the selected box. Selecting a box also slows things down.

posted by TheGreenRye to Technology (6 answers total)

I would use Affinity Publisher - you can set up a page with a load of "Image Frames" (You can preset them to shrink the image keeping the aspect ratio) then just "paste as content" on each one or use "place images" to place a folder of images (one click per box still). There is a trial version and the current deal of ~100 usd for all the apps is really good.
posted by samj at 3:38 AM on November 24, 2022

Because you mentioned Apple Pages, I'm assuming you're working on a Mac.*

One option might be: Printing Multiple Photos to One Page in Photos for Mac

Another option might be Convert Several Images into a Single PDF + print multiple pages per sheet of paper.

If necessary, it is possible to Batch Resize Images.

*I've done an analogous approach using Acrobat Pro on a PC.
posted by oceano at 11:08 AM on November 24, 2022

If you can load them up in one program, Acrobat, or even a word processor one per page (each image taking up as much of the full page as possible), I think every print dialog in existence has a "pages per sheet" setting. The word processor probably also has simple editing tools, like crop.
posted by rhizome at 2:00 PM on November 24, 2022

Teacher here. It may sound odd, but I would use Google Slides or PowerPoint for this. For me, it’s easiest in terms of placing, sizing, and arranging images on a page. You may have to futz with page/print settings to get the printing part to meet your needs.
posted by gnutron at 2:03 PM on November 24, 2022

And following on to gnutron's suggestion, if that idea appeals to you, you could also consider Keynote (if you have Pages, you might also have Keynote) or the Presentation app in Libre Office.
posted by kristi at 3:39 PM on November 24, 2022

Just to confirm do you want a tidy grid of images - where each images is scaled/cropped like this, or not copped and just fitted to the page like this [both links imgur]

Both done using imagemagick - which is a bit intimidating although if someone has written the scripts it is straightforward, the second image used this script:
magick montage *. -geometry 300x300 -tile 5x3 C:\cmdTools\shortpath2/contact.jpg, and the former was from a script a user here wrote me so I'd have to ask them first.
posted by unearthed at 11:33 PM on November 24, 2022