Use Adobe Bridge to Quickly (and Easily!) Make Contact Sheets

March 5th, 2009 by: Justin

If you’re like me, sometimes it’s hard to get a good idea of what your best photos are when you’re looking at them on the screen. Sometimes it’s good to get away from the computer, and look at paper. While I always advocate “staying green” and avoiding paper where possible, sometimes clients (or grandparents) prefer things the old-school way. Professional photographers use “contact sheets” which are sheets of paper with sample images on them, much like you may have seen “thumbnail galleries” online. A contact sheet is a paper version of a thumbnail gallery. Adobe Bridge features a really easy and customizable way to view just the images you select.

Open BR CS4. Select “output” from the top row, and you’ll see a dialog box on the right hand side with multiple sets of options. At the top it asks if you want to output to a pdf file or for the web. According to what output options you choose, you can customize the way you want it to show up.

You can see a couple of samples here; a contact sheet with 40 smaller images, or one with 20 larger ones. You can choose whatever sizes you’d like, or use some of the more common presets.

March 5th, 2009 | Tags: Adobe, Bridge, contact sheets, CS4, iD Tech Camp, photos

Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers

6 Comments »

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6 Responses to Use Adobe Bridge to Quickly (and Easily!) Make Contact Sheets

Thanks for this! I’d spent ages trying to find out how to do this in CS4. (It was somewhere completely different on earlier versions of bridge!)
R

Rob on November 18th, 2009 at 5:15 am

Is there a way or a plugin that will allow for more control over the file name placements? I’m wanting to have the file names below be left justified(as opposed to the default center justified) and closer to the image? I know this may sound unnecessary but it’s something I actually need.

Is there a way to write a script for this or plugin if nothing is available at this time?

James on February 17th, 2010 at 12:06 am

how do u then send it to print please?

vicky on April 28th, 2010 at 5:42 am

Hi,

I have been trying to use the bridge version of creating a contact sheet. What the problem seems to be is when I click on output NONE of the options come up?? I keep clicking and nothing happens.

PLEASE help!