3 Photo Contact Sheet Tools, Compared

You shot two hundred frames and now you need to look at all of them at once — to spot the keepers, to send a client something to choose from, or just to see the shape of the shoot rather than scrolling through it one image at a time.

Contact sheets used to be a darkroom step and are now a software one, which means the capability is buried in whichever application you happen to own. Lightroom has it, Bridge has it, ImageMagick has it, and each of them expects you to already be inside that ecosystem. If you are not — if the photos are in a folder and you want a grid in the next two minutes — the online options vary enormously in whether they upload your images and what they charge for.

How to judge a contact sheet maker

Does it upload your photos? A shoot is often the most sensitive thing a photographer handles. Local, in-browser processing is a materially different position from a server upload.

PNG or PDF? A PDF is right for printing and sending; a PNG is right for pasting into a message or a document.

Can you control the grid? Columns, thumbnail size, spacing, and whether filenames appear are the settings that decide whether the sheet is useful.

What does the free tier really allow? This is where the online options diverge most sharply.

The comparison

Facts checked August 2026; plans can change.

ContactSheetMaker

ContactSheetMaker is the most professional-feeling of the three. It arranges photographs as labelled thumbnails across one or more pages and exports high-quality PDFs, with mood boards, batch renaming, and client proofing in the surrounding product. For sending a proof sheet to a client, a multi-page labelled PDF is exactly the right artefact.

The free tier is narrow: you can create and download a contact sheet without registering, but the free plan is limited to one sheet per week with files auto-deleted after 30 days, and the Pro and Ultimate plans sit at $9 and $19 a month. That is fine for occasional use and restrictive if you shoot regularly.

Gera Tools Contact Sheet Maker

Gera Tools is the strongest free option for control. It states plainly that images are read locally, drawn to a canvas in the browser, and never uploaded — and it gives you adjustable columns, thumbnail size, cell gaps, outer margins, contain-or-cover fitting, optional filenames and running numbers, custom background and text colours, and 1x or 2x export density. You can drag thumbnails to reorder or sort them with natural numeric ordering, and your preferences persist between sessions.

It produces a single PNG. For screen review and for pasting into a document that is ideal; for a paginated print proof across several pages it is not what you want.

ImageMagick montage

ImageMagick’s montage command tiles separate images into one composite, optionally with borders, frames, and image names via -label and -frame. If you make contact sheets often, or over hundreds of folders, a command you can script and rerun beats any interface.

It is a command-line tool with a real learning curve — the flag combinations for spacing, tile geometry, and labelling take some reading to get right — and it needs installing. That investment pays off with repetition and not with a single sheet.

Image Contact Sheet Maker

Ours is the middle path: upload a batch of photos, choose a grid, and get a single contact sheet image back, all in the browser with nothing sent to a server. No account, no weekly cap, no install.

The limitations are honest ones. It produces one sheet image rather than a paginated PDF, so a two-hundred-frame shoot becomes one large grid rather than eight printable pages. It also runs in browser memory, which means very large batches of full-resolution files will strain the tab before they strain any stated limit — resize first if you are working with a big set of RAW-derived JPEGs.

Which one to pick

• If you need a labelled, multi-page PDF to send a client, use ContactSheetMaker and accept the weekly cap.
• If you want maximum control over the grid with nothing uploaded, Gera Tools is the most configurable free option.
• If you will do this repeatedly across many folders, learn ImageMagick’s montage once.
• If you want a quick grid from a batch of photos with no setup, use ours.

How to do it with Image Contact Sheet Maker

1. Open the Image Contact Sheet Maker.
2. Add your photos, resizing very large files first if the batch is big.
3. Set the grid — columns and thumbnail size decide how readable the result is.
4. Download the sheet. More image tools are in the tools directory.

You might also need

• Photo Collage Maker — when the goal is presentation rather than review.
• Image Resizer — to shrink a batch before building a sheet from it.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free contact sheet maker that doesn’t need an account?

Yes. Gera Tools requires no account and states nothing is uploaded, ImageMagick is open source, and ours has no accounts because the site has no signup. ContactSheetMaker lets you create and download without registering but caps the free plan at one sheet a week.

What is a contact sheet for?

Originally it was a print made by laying negatives directly on photographic paper, so an entire roll could be reviewed at once — the Library of Congress’s photographic terminology covers the traditional process. The digital equivalent serves the same purpose: seeing everything from a shoot together rather than in sequence.

Should thumbnails include filenames?

For anything you are sending to someone else, yes. A client saying “the third one in row four” is far worse than a client saying “IMG_4821”, and filenames cost almost nothing in layout space.

Final thought

Pick by output, not by feature list. A PNG grid and a paginated PDF proof are different deliverables, and the fastest tool is the one that produces the one you actually need to hand over.

Try the free Image Contact Sheet Maker