Digital Focus: Create Digital Contact Sheets

A better way to manage your photos; plus, a tiny photo printer.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Creating Contact Sheets

Managing a collection of digital photos is kind of like herding a prairie full of kittens. They're never quite where you expect to find them; moving them around is slow, frustrating work; and if you actually think you're in control of the situation, you're probably mistaken. But that's nothing new; film photographers have wrestled with taking control of their photo collections for decades, and we can learn from them. One of the best solutions they've come up with is something called a contact sheet.

Contact sheets are sort of like photographic cheat sheets. The 8.5-by-11-inch pages contain thumbnail views of all the images stored in a certain folder, file, or shoebox. In the digital world, we can make contact sheets to keep track of all the images on our hard disks. Since contact sheets are so visual, they make it easy to locate and manage a large collection of images.

You might want to print your contact sheets, run them through a three-hole punch, and store them in a binder near your computer. Whenever you want to find a particular image, track it down on the contact sheet. Just be sure to add the name of the folder from which the images come to each page, since few programs do that automatically.

Contact Sheets With ACDSee

Many image-editing programs make it fairly easy to select a folder, or an entire hard disk, and create printable contact sheets. One such contact sheet generator is found in ACDSee, a popular photo organizer. I found this program for about $40 at the PCWorld.com Product Finder.

ACDSee lets you create two kinds of contact sheets: a printable version and a graphic file that is stored on your hard disk. To build a printable contact sheet, just select a batch of photos--like all the images in a folder--and choose Activities, Print, Print Contact Sheet. To create a virtual contact sheet and leave it on your PC, you'd select Activities, Create, Contact Sheet. Whichever path you choose, a handy dialog box lets you specify how many thumbnails appear on the page, what background color to use, and more.

To be honest, I'm not in love with ACDSee's contact sheets: The program has some ill-conceived features. Enable the picture captions, for instance, and it prints the exact same caption under each and every thumbnail on the page! If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements, give its contact sheet generator a spin instead.

Customize a Contact Sheet in Photoshop Elements

To start the contact sheet feature in Photoshop Elements, choose File, Automate, Contact Sheet II. The Contact Sheet II dialog box offers fewer options than ACDSee does, but it's quite functional nonetheless. Photoshop lets you use the images' file names as captions, for instance (although in some cases the names may be truncated). After you select the appropriate folder and click OK, Photoshop processes each image, turns it into a thumbnail, and pastes it into the contact sheet. Be prepared to wait a while if you have a lot of photos.

The Photoshop Elements contact sheet is more stark than the one ACDSee generates--you get a plain white background, for instance, instead of the option to use a custom background color or background image. But you can get much the same effect in Photoshop anyway. Just click on the Paint Bucket Tool in Photoshop's tool palette, then select a color by clicking on the foreground color at the very bottom of the tool palette. After you choose a color and close the Color Picker, click anywhere in the white background of the contact sheet--it'll be instantly transformed to your selected color. You may need to zoom in and use the Paint Bucket to fill in the white space inside some text.

You can even paste a background image into your contact sheet. To do that, open an image that's the same pixel size as the contact sheet and copy it to the clipboard. Then return to the contact sheet and click on the Magic Wand Tool in the tool palette. Click on the white background, and then choose Edit, Paste Into. The contact sheet should now have an image in the background.

Create Your Own in Paint Shop Pro

Other image editors don't have a special tool for the task, but you can use them to make your own contact sheets nonetheless. In Paint Shop Pro, for instance, choose File, Browse. If you have version 8, select all of the images in a folder and choose File, Print Layout. Now you can drag and drop images from the left side of the screen into your blank print layout view, arrange the images to suit your taste, and print the page when you're done. If you're using version 7.x, you'd use File, Print Preview to do the same thing.

Dave's Favorites: Kodak EasyShare Printer Dock

Thanks to the rise of PDAs and their ubiquitous little desktop docking cradles, docking stations for digital cameras are getting popular as well. Indeed, a number of digital cameras are starting to ship with cradles or docks that make it easy to transfer images to your computer and to charge the camera's batteries as well. Kodak offers something truly innovative, though: The EasyShare Printer Dock, a gadget that combines a camera charger, a USB computer connection, and yes, a printer. And the whole thing is small enough to balance in the palm of your hand.

The Printer Dock 6000 is compatible with Kodak EasyShare CX/DX 6000 and LS600 series digital cameras; Printer Dock 4000 works with Kodak EasyShare CX/DX 3000/4000 series cameras.

Since I love wide-format ink jet printers that let me create images as big as 13 by 17 inches, I didn't expect much from the EasyShare Printer Dock, which generates mere 4-by-6-inch prints. But I was badly mistaken--it took me just a few days to fall in love. You just take a picture, place the camera in the dock, and print images stored on the camera by tapping the Print button on the dock.

Thanks to the printer's dye sublimation print engine, the pictures are sharp, with bright and vivid colors. And unlike most ink jet printers, the printer dock creates true edge-to-edge, borderless prints. Dye sublimation printers are known for creating "continuous tones," which means there are no discernable discrete dots of color like you get from an ink jet.

You can't make 8-by-10-inch prints with the Printer Dock, but that's not what it's all about. I quickly became addicted to the joys of taking pictures and instantly printing them. Since I switched from 35mm to digital, 4-by-6-inch prints have become a rarity around my house; the Kodak device has reminded me just how much fun it can be to print snapshots anytime I want them.

You can read more about the printer docks at Kodak's Web site. I found the EasyShare Printer Dock 6000 for about $170 at our Product Finder.

Q&A: Will My DVDs Play in Europe?

I want to buy a DVD burner for my computer to make home movies from VCR tapes and a digital camcorder. But if I do that, will my relatives in Germany be able to watch the videos on their DVD player? I have heard that there are country codes recorded on the disc that let you watch it only in the country in which it was made.

--Marty Miller, Fountain, Colorado

There are two things you need to consider, Marty: first, country codes; second, the video standard you use.

The country codes should be no problem: Those are designed to prevent the piracy of commercial DVDs that are sold in stores. Any disc you make at home is code free; it'll play on any DVD player.

But a more important issue is the video standard you use to make your movies. These standards define how many lines of video are displayed on screen, and what frequency the television uses to display them. In the United States, televisions use NTSC, which translates to 525 lines of resolution at 30 frames per second, and a 60-Hz field frequency. However, European televisions use PAL, which translates to 625 lines and 25 frames per second, at a 50-Hz field frequency. There's also SECAM (used in Eastern Europe and Asia) and HDTV, an emerging worldwide standard for high resolution broadcasts.

So what's a DVD hobbyist to do? If you're making a DVD for export to friends and family in Europe, be sure to import the video into your PC using the appropriate video standard. Most video capture and editing programs let you select NTSC or PAL; SECAM is a lot more rare. Be sure to use PAL for movies you make for your German folks. Of course, that also means you'll need to make two versions of any disc--one for NTSC and one for PAL.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Water on Leaves," by Ed Smothers, Carnegie, Pennsylvania

Ed says that he shot this week's Hot Pic while walking through the woods in eastern Ohio. There had been a rainstorm the night before. He used a Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 850.

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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