Contact sheets

To print contact sheets you must first switch to thumbnail view and select the images you want to be printed. Then select Print Preview to preview the printed pages or Print to print the pages.

Use the Page Setup dialog to adjust the layout of the contact sheet. The "Thumbnail columns" and "Thumbnail rows" settings control the number of thumbnails that are printed on each page and "Spacing between thumbnails" specifies the gap between each thumbnail.

Select "Add border" if to add a thin black border around the images. Normally images look better with a border, but if the images have been prepared with a border or frame already (e.g. a drop shadow effect) the border added during printing can be turned off.

The thumbnail images can be rotated so that they fit the page better by selecting one of the following options from the "Rotate Thumbnails:" dropdown list:

Thumbnail images will be resized to fill the area available to them. This can result in portrait and landscape (vertical and horizontal format) images being different sizes. Click on the "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the same size" to prevent this happening. e.g. if the area available for printing the thumbnail is a rectangle 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels high and landscape thumbnail would fill this area whereas a portrait thumbnail would be resized to 267 x 400 pixels. If "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the same size" is selected the landscape thumbnail would be resized to 400 x 267 pixels to match the size of the portrait thumbnail.

Each thumbnail can have an optional caption printed below it. The default setting is "@file@" which prints the filename of the image. You can use any of the tokens defined in the HTML Page Generation section to caption the image using EXIF shooting data extracted from the image. You can also insert "\n" to add a line break so that the caption is printed on more than one line.

Examples:

To print the image filename with the date the picture was taken on the line below:

@file@\n@date@

To print the image filename, shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting:

@file@\n@shutter@ sec @ f/@aperture@, ISO @iso@

To print the image filename and the lens focal length:

@file@\n@lens@mm @ @focalLength@mm

To print the image filename with a one blank line before the caption and two after (the @empty@ token is required otherwise the leading and trailing "\n" new lines will be ignored):

@empty@\n@file@\n@empty@\n@empty@

Captions will automatically word wrap onto the next line if they are wider than the available space. When "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the same size" is selected in "Page Setup" the thumbnails are top justified and vertically centered within the area available to them and as many lines of the caption as possible are printed.

When "Make portrait and landscape thumbnails the same size" is not selected the the thumbnails are vertically centered within the area available to them unless the caption is too long in which case the thumbnail is moved up and if necessary made smaller to make space for the caption. The thumbnail won't be resized less than 1/3 than the height available to it in order to make space for the caption. If the caption contains more lines than the available space the extra lines won't be printed.

The font used for thumbnail captions can be changed by clicking on the "Caption Font..." button.

Each page can have an optional footer that is printed at the bottom of the page. If this is left blank no footer is printed and the space is made available for printing the thumbnails. The footer may contain the following tokens:

@dir@ - the full pathname of the directory containing the images e.g. C:\Photos\2003-09-28

@parent@ - then name of the directory containing the images e.g. 2003-09-28

@date@ - the date the contact sheet is printed (i.e. today's date)

@time@ - the time the contact sheet is printed

@page@ - the current page number

@numPages@ - the total number of pages necessary to print all the selected images

@volumeName@ - the name of the disk drive

The font used for footer text can be changed by clicking on the "Footer Font..." button.