MAKE CONTACT

Make Contact is an AppleScript application that automates the process of creating contact sheets in Photoshop. It was created for Splash News, a photo agency whose photographers create dozens of contact sheets every day. Previously, to make a contact sheet, a photographer had to resize each image in Photoshop, paste it into a new document, move it to the correct position, paste in the Splash logo, then save the contact sheet. This took a few minutes per sheet, and there were inconsistencies to the way the contact sheets looked. Splash also wanted to add a few steps to the process, but didn't want to add to the photographers' workload.

Make Contact automates the existing process, and does more. The photographer just drags a folder of images onto Make Contact's icon. It asks how many images there should be per sheet, and what color the text should be. It then creates the new document, places the Splash logo, resizes each image and places it in the correct position. It then places the picture's file name in a text layer in Photoshop, and gives it the color the photographer specified. It also reads the IPTC information from the first picture and uses that to create a headline entry at the bottom of the sheet. It also writes all of the IPTC data to the contact sheet itself. If there are more pictures than will fit on one sheet, it keeps going until all of the pictures have been processed.



Since Make Contact runs unattended, the photographer is free to do other things while the contact sheets are being created. And since the process is automated, the contact sheets all have a consistent look, and have more information than they did when they were created manually.