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Guillaume Coté
Asked: 2010-11-12 14:48:08 +0800 CST

Which contact sheet generator can be scripted?

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A contact sheet is a image containing the name and a the small version of a group of images, like this:

example of a contact sheet

Which is the best program to do it from the command line (preferably something that is already package with Ubuntu)?

scripts software-recommendation command-line

2 Answers

  1. montage (part of the imagemagick package) can do this.

    The options are exhastive so i thoroughly recommend running man montage but here's an example I pulled to show off the perverse level of detail you can go into:

    montage -size 400x400 ~/Pictures/2008/Sept/*.JPG  -thumbnail 200x200 -font /var/lib/defoma/gs.d/dirs/fonts/Vera.ttf  -set caption '%t' -bordercolor Lavender -background grey40  -gravity Center   -pointsize 9  -density 144x144  +polaroid  -resize 50%   -set label ''  -background white  -geometry +1+1  -tile 5x  index.html

    It makes both a webpage and a contact image.

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  2. For interactive use, feh takes the prize, especially if you're dealing with a lot of images. feh -t images... and you're off. Has options to easily control thumb and total sizes, and the thumbs are clickable through to the real thing.

    For printing, feh works, but montage (as per @Oli's suggestion) is probably more dependable as it handles more image formats than feh.

    For completeness I should mention that gimp-plugin-registry has a plugin for Gimp ("Contact Sheet 2.0") that produces contact sheets from a directory of images, which is relatively user friendly.

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