This will add enough space in the contact sheet for us to add the captions later
Type in your measured height in the Vertical Offset field, in my case 72.Choose the same number of rows and columns as before.But this time we’ll be changing a few of the script settings. Use the Ruler tool to measure the much needed space for adding captions.ĭouble click the ImageCatalog.jsx script again and choose your image folder. Now that we have all the needed ingredients it’s time to close our test file and start building the actual contact sheet. Notice that the Info panel will pop-up automatically and tell you the total distance (about 72 points in my case). For this I use the Measure tool and measure the total height. Now let’s measure the total amount of space that is needed to position the caption. (Note: if the resulting text frame says then this means the text frame is probably touching other images, and you’ll need to move the other images away.) Now apply the caption by selecting your image and choosing Object > Captions > Generate Static Caption. Click OK when you’re done to close the window. This will be the distance between the image and the actual caption text. I will keep most of the Position and Style options at the bottom of the window as they are but only want to change the Offset value, there I choose 8 points. Here you choose Image ICC and Dimensions from the dropdown list. So click the (+) symbol at the right of the window to add two more metadata fields. I would like to use three metadata fields in my contact sheet: filename, ICC profile and image dimensions. Delete the filename of one of the images on your page, then select that corresponding image and choose Object > Captions > Caption Setup. Now it’s time to see how much room we need for our captions. This is because these file names are too long and thus result in overset text frames. Notice that the graphic frames have different proportions and not all the image names are visible on the page.
However, there is a free script included with InDesign (yes, you already have it!) that allows you to import all the images - it’s called ImageCatalog.jsx! Another option might be to use Data Merge, but that requires other setup. But remember that we have a very large folder of images and Gridify requires that you place the grid one page at a time.
But first, how to get all the images in? One option is to use the Gridify feature. The metadata part might be something you’ve heard before: Yes, we will be using the Captions option in InDesign - more on that in a minute. Find a way to automatically create the necessary metadata and place this information under our image thumbnails.Find a way to automatically place an entire folder of images, page per page, in a new InDesign document.Sure, you could invest in a few handy scripts that do all the work for you, but there actually is a perfect workflow that you can use within InDesign.įirst of all, let’s take a look at our available tools? what can we use today to accomplish this? Well, our job requires things: I remember that I used to do this in Photoshop (back in the pre-Bridge period, long time ago), later I used Bridge to create an InDesign contact sheet, but today that option has been discontinued leaving us all to fend for ourselves.Īnd it’s not only the contact sheet that sometimes leaves people with a big question mark hanging above their heads, the metadata part isn’t simple either. Now that made me think of the way we used to create contact sheets. And of course he wanted to do this using only InDesign.
The other day one of my clients told me he wanted to create a contact sheet from his archive of images, but he also wanted to add extra metadata to every image.