Digital Proofs Are a Time-Saving Trick

If you’re anything like me, you take a LOT of pictures. So many, in fact, that it’s quite a challenge to remember what you’ve got when you’re looking for something to fit a particular paper crafting project. And since the beauty of digital is that you don’t have to store prints of every single image you take, it makes flipping through them even more challenging.

Here’s one way to make it easy to “flip” through those photos without printing each individual shot:

Print contact sheets or proofs of your images in a scaled-down size. You’ll be able to fit up to 30 images on an 8 1/2”x11” sheet of paper and flip through the pages to look at what you’ve got. I recommend doing this once a month or so, depending on how you organize your photos. If you organize them by date, particularly by month, it will be easy to simply create thumbnails of say, January 2005’s photos. Then just hole punch the paper and keep it in a binder of printed contact sheets or proofs.

If you organize your images by theme, you can create a new contact sheet each time you add new photos to a section. Simply print the ones you’ve just added, rather than all of the photos in the file. Be sure to keep the binder organized by the month or theme with dividers or some sort of labels—otherwise it’ll be quite a challenge to find the image you finally decide on.

Many of you already have image programs that will do this for you easily. For example, in Photoshop, you can go to File > Automate > Contact Sheet II. Here you can select “Browse” to specify the folder containing the images you want a contact sheet or proof made of.

Under the “Document” section you can specify the dimensions, resolution and color mode you’d like for your contact sheet. Then under “Thumbnails” you can select the layout option you’d like for the thumbnails (the number per row and the total number of columns you’d like). You can also select “Use Filename As Caption” to label each thumbnail using it’s file name. Save the contact sheet after your program has created it, and print it out to add to your binder.

Other programs will allow you to create a contact sheet of each image that is open, so you can open the images you’d like on the contact sheet and tell your program to create the sheet. See the manual of your own program for specific instructions on creating proofs or creating contact sheets.

Having all your images in a place where you can easily flip through will save you time and give you the chance to easily sit down and reminisce.