Contact sheet
What Contact sheet actually does
A proof sheet is a printing artifact before it is an image. Its width is a sheet of paper, its resolution decides whether a caption survives the printer, and a shoot of two hundred frames becomes a numbered sequence of pages rather than one enormous picture. Most browser tools that call themselves contact sheet makers skip all three: they hand back a single image at whatever pixel size the grid happened to need, with no paper behind it and nowhere for frame 61 to go. This one starts from the sheet. Choose A4 or Letter and a resolution between 36 and 1200, and the margins, gutters, cell width, caption strip and rows per sheet are all derived from that paper at that resolution, exactly as the command line tool derives them. Frames that do not fit flow onto the next sheet and every sheet is numbered in its heading. The preview is the sheet, drawn at the same geometry as the file you download, so what you approve on screen is the arrangement that prints.
How to use it
- Choose frames. They are decoded in this tab and listed in the order they will be laid out. A frame the browser cannot decode is named in that list and left out of the sheet rather than ending the run.
- Set the order. Digit-aware ordering is the default, so frame 2 comes before frame 10 rather than after it, and the arrows beside any frame move it by hand.
- Set the paper. Paper size, resolution, columns, background, heading and captions each redraw the sheet immediately. When the frames exceed one sheet, a page control appears and every sheet can be inspected.
- Download. A single sheet arrives as one image and a paginated run arrives as a numbered set, both rendered at full paper resolution rather than at preview resolution.
Useful for
- Hand a client a printed page of every frame from a session, numbered, so selections can be marked with a pen.
- Keep a printed index beside an archive of negatives, scans or exported masters.
- Check a folder of exports at a glance before delivery, at the size they will actually be printed.
Limits worth knowing
- The sheet is a raster page. It is not a PDF and it carries no vector text.
- A sheet is refused above 16384 pixels on a side or 40 megapixels in total, because a canvas beyond that quietly paints nothing. Fewer columns, a lower resolution or a paper size instead of none will bring it back inside.
- Captions are the file names. There is no field for a title, a rating or a keyword taken from the frame.
- Ordering by capture time is not offered here; the order is the one shown in the list.
Questions people ask
Why does the resolution matter if I only want to look at it?
It decides how many pixels a printed inch gets. At 150 the captions stay readable on paper; at 72 they blur. If the sheet is only ever going on a screen, choose the smaller number and the file gets smaller with it.
What happens to a frame the browser cannot open?
It is named in the frame list and left out of the sheet. The count under the list always says how many were laid out and how many were excluded.
Can I get one long sheet instead of pages?
Choose none for the paper and the sheet grows to fit every frame in one column run, up to the size limit.