What the Adobe tools do
Contact Sheet II (in Photoshop under File › Automate) builds a Photoshop document of thumbnails from a folder, with the filename under each, and flattens it into one big picture. It's quick, but the result is an image, not a PDF with text, and captions are limited to the filename.
Adobe Bridge has an Output workspace that makes a PDF contact sheet from selected photos, with templates, headers, footers and filename overlays. It's the closest thing to this page, and it's free to download with an Adobe account.
What's different here
- Nothing to install, no account, works on a Chromebook or a borrowed computer.
- Captions from EXIF: date taken, camera and lens, shutter speed, aperture, ISO and focal length, as well as filenames and frame numbers.
- A real PDF: thumbnails as JPEGs at print resolution and captions as searchable text.
- Your own caption text with placeholders:
Roll 12 · {n}or{folder}-{n}numbers every frame. - A film-strip look with sprocket holes and edge numbers, if you want a sheet that looks like a darkroom contact print.
- Private: photos are read on your computer and never uploaded.
Moving a Bridge or Photoshop habit across
| In Bridge / Photoshop | Here |
|---|---|
| Document size and orientation | Paper: A4, US Letter, A3 or Legal; portrait or landscape |
| Columns and rows | Columns, then rows (or "as many as fit"), or thumbnails per page |
| Spacing / margins | Margin and gap in millimetres |
| Use filename as caption | Captions › File name (long names shortened in the middle, keeping the number) |
| Rotate for best fit | Photos are shown upright as taken; choose the frame shape and whether to fill the frame |
| Header and footer | Title, today's date and "Page 1 of 3" |
Where the Adobe tools are still better
If you need colour-managed output for a particular printer profile, watermarks, or a sheet built from a Lightroom collection with your edits applied, stay with Adobe. This page uses each photo as it is (for RAW files, the camera's own preview), in sRGB, which is right for proofing and archiving and wrong for critical colour work.