Make a Contact Sheet of Your Images – Sorta

Remember back in the day before computers, the photographer would give you a sheet with maybe 20 different images on it so you could pick the best ones for printing or whatever. That, my friends, in case you are too young to recall, was called a contact sheet.

Now, in the computer age, when everything is done instantly, and no one seems to care about quality; in the age where quantity is king, we all tend to have way too many pictures. Yes, indeed, I’m guilty too. Heck, you don’t have to buy film or pay for processing so we snap away hoping to get a few great shots and some good ones out of hundreds. And that’s OK. Most computers built in the few years have really bit hard drives so storing thousands of pictures is child’s play.

But sorting them out? Not so easy. You can scroll through the folder and look at thumbnails, one at a time, and if you like that sort of thing, you can stop reading. But if you’re looking for a very fast way of indexing a folder or folders of images, you might want to try the freeware program called Thumbindex.

OK Thumbindex is no Picasa. It’s got a simplistic design and a rudimentary interface, but, by golly, it works and it makes a great index file – like a contact sheet – you can open in your browser and see all the pictures in a folder – quickly and easily. So essentially you can see what’s in there, because I’m betting most of you don’t know what exactly is in those folders full of images dating back 10 years.

Another nice thing about the html file created by Thumbindex, is that you can open it in any browser because, after all, an html file is a Web page. And since you can open it in your browser, my friend, you can resize the images by using your Ctrl key plus your mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Here is a smalll part of an html file created from images in one of my InfoAve image folder which contains, thousands of images, most of which I didn’t know where there.

Pretty cool, eh?

A few words from the author now:

“ThmbIndex v1.0

ThmbIndex creates a contact print style index for an image folder. It creates a jpeg image with thumbnails and an optional map file. The map file, when run in a browser, creates a clickable index for the images in the folder.

You have full control of which file types to show, the width, number of columns and background color.

Use the index on your PC, on your CD, USB stick or memorycard of images or use ThmbIndex before uploading image files to the web to create a simple visual index. “

You can download Thumbindex from us (so you know it’s clean!) from this link.

Just unzip the file and run the executable. If you want to add shortcuts to it so you can findYou can download Thumbindex from us (so you know it’s clean!) from this link. it again, right-click the exe file and choose “Pin to Start…” , “Pin to Taskbar” or choose “Send to Desktop (create shortcut)” or do all three if you like.

The zip file contains only an executable (the program) and a help document explaining how to use the program – which would be a good thing for you to read, eh?

This program works on all versions of Windows from XP through Windows 10 – both 64-bit and 32-bit.