Make a web contact sheet

- [Voiceover] You're gonna love this. (laughs) I'm so crazy about this one. When I discovered this I was going, man, I can do so many things with this particular function. What is that? We're gonna create a contact sheet for the web. Now this isn't just any old contact sheet where you just have a bunch of thumbnails or something, this is a dynamic, cool, knock your socks kind of contact sheet. Let me show you how it works. So first thing we do is create an album, that's what I recommend, and put the shots in it that you want for your contact sheet.

And remember the way that you create an album is that you would just highlight the project that you're in, you go up to the plus sign, and then you go Album Inside Old Cameras, that's what I did, made this right here, and then I just dragged the shots into it. Remember, when you drag the shots from one album to another they're not moving them, they're just making virtual copies of them, essentially. Alright, then once I do that I'm just gonna select them all, Command + A, and let's go up to File, let's go down here to Make Web Contact Sheet.

Now it's got this little message here 'cause I have variants. Do you only want the primary variant or do you want the ones that you've added? I want them all, so I'm not gonna go with just the primary variant, I want them all, so I'm gonna click All right here. And it's gonna do a little work for me. There we go, it kind of builds my sheet. So far so good. Pretty interesting. We're gonna give a title, Old Cameras right there. Oh wait, before I do that I gotta show you we got some different formats.

It is neat. And they're dynamic, so you can just test the formats while you're doing it. But I like this one, I like the Classic Dark. Gonna go with that. Give it a title, that goes there, give it a description, right there. We don't need to capitalize photos, do we? There we go. Copyright, Derrick Story. And then it's gonna create a link, so I'm just gonna take it to my Digital Story website.

That way if you wanted to see more of my stuff or whatever. Caption, we're gonna go with a variant name, just like that. And we can make the thumbnails bigger, smaller, I like them the way they are and I like the preview size the way it is. We'll go up to 80% for our quality. There we go. And then it's gonna tell us where it's gonna put it and it's gonna just go right on the Desktop, which is where I want it. However, if you don't want that click here and you can choose a spot.

We'll go over there our self. Alright, I think we're ready. Click Export down here and it'll work for a second. Alright, now if I had the boxed checked show us afterwards it would pop up on the screen right now. We're gonna go over there our self though. So I'll minimize this. Here's our folder. So this whole folder, if you were to put this on the web, this whole folder would go on the web server in the appropriate way. We'll just double-click on index.html and here we are.

Look at this. It's this nifty? Watch. Ah, that's so cool, isn't it? Next. You have your information down here, you have where the image stands in the sequence. I just dig this. This is so nice. Now if you wanted to share a handful of photos with someone yes, you can go to the various services, SmugMug and so forth. If you have your own server, if you have a place to put them online, do this.

You can completely brand it the way that you want and it just looks absolutely fabulous. (laughs) I mean, I really like it. I'll just close right here. Here's my copyright down here and then here's that link we created and watch what happens. Click on that. And there we go. So then it sends them right to my site. Oh, look at this, a promotion for my Photos for OS X Essential Training on lynda.com.

Anyway, let's go back to our contact sheet. There we are. And I'll show you the folder. So the folder has all the things that you would need. The XML, the index, there's your thumbnails and previews, the scripts, the theme, all right here. Just put that on your web server, or you can send it to somebody. You can put it on a flash drive and just say double-click on index.html and they could enjoy it that way. This is a nice little piece of work here.

Nice bonus, I did not anticipate this and I love it.