How to Create a Contact Sheet Online for Free

A contact sheet is the fastest way to show somebody an entire shoot at once. One page, every frame, each one labelled, in the order you shot them. This guide walks through making one in a browser — no Lightroom licence, no install, and no upload — and through the decisions that separate a sheet somebody can work from and a sheet they squint at and ignore.

The whole job takes about two minutes once you know which numbers to set. Most of what follows is about those numbers.

What you need before you start

Only the photos. Open the contact sheet maker and everything happens on your own machine: the images are read by the browser, the grid is laid out in the page, and the PDF is written locally. Nothing is sent to a server, which is why it works on a phone tether at a venue with bad signal and why it is free.

• JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP or WebP. Export your selects at around 1,600px on the long edge — that is more than enough for a thumbnail, and it keeps the PDF small enough to email.
• Filenames you can live with. They print under each frame, so DSC_4471.jpg is fine and final_v2_FINAL_actually.jpg is not. If yours need work, fix them first with the batch file renamer.
• The order you want them in. Drop a whole folder in one go and it keeps the folder's order, which is usually capture order.

Step 1: Add the photos

Drag the folder straight onto the page, or use the Images panel to pick them. They appear in the grid immediately. Drag any thumbnail to move it — worth doing for the two or three frames that belong next to each other even though you shot them an hour apart.

Step 2: Choose a grid that matches the job

This is the decision that matters most, and the one people get wrong. The grid controls how large each frame prints, and the right answer depends entirely on whether somebody is choosing from the sheet or being shown it.

Rule of thumb: if somebody has to decide from the sheet, keep it at 20 frames a page or fewer. If they only have to find something they already know exists, go dense. When the grid is full the sheet pages automatically, so a 200-frame shoot at 5 × 7 becomes six pages rather than one unreadable one.

Then set the spacing. The gutter is the page margin, the gap is the space between frames. Widen the gutter to about 28–32px if the sheet will be printed and written on: people need somewhere to put a tick that is not on top of a photograph.

Step 3: Turn on the labels that matter

A contact sheet without labels is a mood board. The entire point is that somebody can name the frame they mean, in an email, without attaching it.

• Filenames under each frame. Turn off the extension — .jpg on 35 frames is 35 pieces of noise, and nobody ever said "the third one, dot jay peg".
• Frame numbers if the filenames are long or ugly. A client saying "we want 12, 14 and 31" is unambiguous and quick to type.
• Captions when the filename is not the useful name. Room names on a property shoot beat IMG_2231 every time.

Keep the label font small — extra-small or small. It is a reference, not a caption, and every point you add to the type is a point taken off the photograph.

Step 4: Add the shoot details

A header and footer turn a page of thumbnails into a document. Put the client or shoot name in the header, the date and page numbers in the footer. Six months later, when the file is in a folder called new folder (2), that header is the only thing that tells you what you are looking at.

If the sheet is leaving your machine, add a watermark — a text line or your logo, placed in a corner at low opacity. There is a full walkthrough in adding a watermark to your contact sheets.

Step 5: Export the PDF

Export writes a print-ready PDF at up to 300dpi, rendered on your own machine. Two settings are worth understanding:

• Resolution. 150dpi is right for anything read on a screen and keeps the file small. Use 300dpi only if the sheet is genuinely going on paper.
• Quality. 0.85 is invisible at thumbnail size and roughly halves the file against 0.95. A 35-frame sheet lands around 2–4MB, which gets through every mail server.

You can also export the pages as PNG or JPEG if the sheet is going into a deck rather than an inbox.

Getting selects back without the email thread

A PDF goes one way. If you need an answer rather than a delivery, send a review link instead: the client opens it with no account, taps the frames they want, types a note on any of them, and submits. The picks and comments land in your dashboard and you get an email with the filenames — no "the one where she's laughing, third row, maybe fourth?" thread.

Five mistakes that make a contact sheet useless

1. 01Too many frames per page. 60 thumbnails on A4 is an archive reference, not a selection tool. Nobody can judge focus at that size.
2. 02Labels off. The client picks by pointing at their screen, which does not survive being forwarded.
3. 03Extensions left on. Pure noise, repeated once per frame.
4. 04Shuffled order. Capture order is information. It shows how a scene developed, and it is how you will find the frame in your catalogue.
5. 05300dpi on a sheet nobody prints. A 40MB PDF that bounces off the client's mail server helps no one.

How this compares to Lightroom, Photoshop and Bridge

Every one of them can make a contact sheet, and all three assume you already have the catalogue open and the licence paid. Lightroom's Print module is the most capable and the slowest to set up; Photoshop's Contact Sheet II is a dialog that has not changed in fifteen years; Bridge's Output workspace was removed and then partly restored. There is a full walkthrough of the Adobe routes, and where they cost you time, in how to make a contact sheet in Lightroom.

The browser version wins on exactly one axis, which happens to be the one that matters on a deadline: you can go from a folder to a PDF on any machine, including one that has never had Adobe installed, in about two minutes.