Printing contact sheets on Windows

A contact sheet displays thumbnails of photos. It's useful for making a printed record of the photos on your computer. Contact sheets are created differently in Elements on Windows, and on Mac. This movie is for Windows users only. On Windows, you can create and print a contact sheet by starting in the Organizer, or the Editor, using to Create menu in both locations. I'm going to start here in the Organizer. I could select just some of the photos that you see for inclusion in my contact sheet, or if I just go right to Create menu, and choose Photo Prints, and then Contact Sheet, Elements will print all of the currently displayed photos in my contact sheet.

I'll click Yes, that's what I would like to do, and that opens the Prints dialog box. This is the same dialogue is the one that we saw in the movies on printing individual photos, except that in step four, the Type of print is set to Contact Sheet. So, I'm not going to spend time on all of the other print settings here. To learn more about those, you can take a look at the movies about printing individual prints. In the center of the dialog box, you can see a preview of my contact sheet, with the default settings. I'm using both vertical and horizontal photos in this contact sheet, and you can see that they're obviously different in the aspect ratios.

If I want them all to be square on the contact sheet, I can come down and check Crop to Fit in the column on the right, znd that scales the portrait, or vertical orientation photos, so that they fit in squares. Since this is just a record of my photos, I am not really concerned about the effect of scaling the thumbnails up, as I might be for individual photo prints. In the column on the right, I can customize the layout for this contact sheet, by changing the number of columns in the contact sheet. So, if I set it to 3, I get less thumbnails on a page, and each one is bigger.

Of course, now all my photos don't fit on this single page, so my contact sheet is now two pages long. And if I click this arrow, you can see the second page. If a check Show Print Options, I have the option to add the photo's date, any caption I may have added to the file, the file name, and the contact sheet page number. I think it's important to have the file name under each photo in a contact sheet, so that you know which photo the thumbnail's correspond to. Now, it's hard to see here, but I now have a little file name printed underneath each one of the thumbnails.

And if I check Page Numbers, that will add a page number at the bottom of each of the pages in this contact sheet. Here I can choose how many copies of the contact sheet I want to print. If I set this to 3, for example, I will get six pages, since this contact sheet has two pages, and I get three copies of each page. When I'm done choosing all of my settings it's time to click the Print button, and Elements will send my contact sheet directly to my inkjet printer for printing.