Contact Sheet PDF Maker

A contact sheet is a page of small thumbnails showing many frames from a shoot at once. It began in the darkroom, where strips of negatives were printed directly onto paper so photographers could choose which frames to enlarge. Digital contact sheets serve the same purpose: they give you and your clients an overview of a set, making it easier to compare images and pick favorites.

Click the area labeled Click to upload images and select several photos at once. The file names appear in a list along with Layout Settings. Enter the number of Columns you want, from 1 to 10, with 3 as the default. Then press Generate PDF Contact Sheet and the tool lays the images out in a grid across as many A4 pages as needed and downloads the result as contact-sheet.pdf. Selecting files again replaces the current set.

JPG and PNG, the most common formats for exported proofs, work best, and any other image format your browser can open, such as WebP, works too. Each photo is turned into a JPEG thumbnail of at most 1200 pixels on its long side, with any transparent areas on white, which keeps the PDF light enough to email. Images are placed in the order shown in the file list, and files that cannot be opened are skipped. Export RAW files to JPG before adding them.

The column count controls thumbnail size. Each image sits in a square cell, and the cells are sized so the chosen number of columns fills the width of an A4 page with even margins. Every photo is fitted inside its cell with its proportions kept, so verticals and horizontals both appear whole. As many rows as fit go on each page before a new one starts. Three columns gives large thumbnails that are easy to judge for expression and focus, while five or six columns fit many more frames per sheet.

Send the PDF after a session so clients can review the set on any device without a gallery login, or print it for an in-person selection meeting. The sheet carries no file names, so clients refer to images by page and position when making picks. Contact sheets are also handy for your own archive, giving you a one-page visual record of what each shoot contains.

Yes. It is free, adds no watermark and needs no software. The PDF is built entirely in your browser, so your images stay on your own device and are never uploaded. To use it, you confirm you are a photographer and create or log in to a free Imagen account once, and every other tool on the site opens up as well.