How to Make a Contact Sheet on Mac or Windows

You do not need Adobe to make a contact sheet. macOS and Windows both ship with something that will put a grid of photos on a page, and for a quick look at a folder they are fine. Where they fall down is labels, layout control, and anything a client has to answer. Here is each built-in route, step by step, and where it stops being enough.

On a Mac: Preview

Preview is the most useful of the built-in options because it works on files straight from a folder, with nothing to import.

1. 01Select the images in Finder and open them together in Preview. They appear in one window with a sidebar of thumbnails.
2. 02Press ⌘P to print, and click Show Details if the dialog opens collapsed.
3. 03Make sure the dialog is set to print all the images, not only the one selected in the sidebar.
4. 04Find the Layout options — a row of its own on recent versions of macOS, or an item in the pop-up menu on older ones.
5. 05Set Pages per Sheet to 4, 6, 9, or 16, choose a layout direction, and add a thin border if you like.
6. 06To get a PDF rather than a print, open the PDF menu at the bottom of the dialog and choose Save as PDF.

Sixteen frames a page is the ceiling, and there are no filenames under them. As a visual index of a folder, it is perfectly good. As something to send a client, it is a page of pictures they cannot refer to.

On a Mac: the Photos app

1. 01Select the photos in Photos. They have to be in your Photos library — files sitting in a folder need importing first.
2. 02Choose File → Print.
3. 03Pick Contact Sheet from the layouts and check the preview.
4. 04Set the paper size, then click Print. In the system print dialog that follows, use the PDF menu and Save as PDF if you want a file.

It looks tidy and takes seconds. It offers very little control over spacing or labels, and importing a client's shoot into your personal photo library just to print a page of thumbnails is a habit worth not getting into.

On Windows: Print Pictures

1. 01Select the photos in File Explorer.
2. 02Right-click and choose Print. On Windows 11 it may be under Show more options.
3. 03In the Print Pictures window, scroll the layouts on the right down to Contact sheet.
4. 04Choose the paper size and quality.
5. 05To make a PDF instead of a print, set the printer to Microsoft Print to PDF.
6. 06Untick Fit picture to frame if you do not want the edges of each photo cropped, then click Print.

The contact sheet layout is fixed at 35 frames a page. There is no other density on offer, no header, and no control over labels — but it is two clicks from any folder on any Windows machine, which counts for a lot.

What the built-in tools cannot do

The gap that matters is labels. A grid of unlabelled thumbnails is fine for you, because you know what you shot. It is no use to anybody else: they cannot tell you which frame they mean without a screenshot and an arrow, and that does not survive being forwarded.

The same steps on any computer

The contact sheet maker runs in any modern browser, so the steps are identical on a Mac, a Windows laptop, or a borrowed machine at a venue:

1. 01Drop the folder onto the page. Files are read straight from disk — no library, no import.
2. 02Set the columns and rows. The page redraws as you type, so you can see when the frames get too small to judge.
3. 03Turn on filenames, and frame numbers if the filenames are long.
4. 04Add a header with the client, the shoot, and the date.
5. 05Download the PDF.

Nothing is uploaded, which matters when the photographs belong to a client. The full walkthrough covers every setting, and if the sheet is going on paper, how to print a contact sheet covers the print settings that decide whether it comes out at the right size.