Want to create contact sheets, photo albums, or coffee table books of your photos? Want to make a catalog of all of your vector artwork? Download a reprint of my most recent article for InDesign Magazine: Quick and Easy Photo Contact Sheets (4.3mb PDF file) to learn how. I've also created scripts and templates to accompany the article (906k zip file). I blogged about this previously, but just received permission from the good folks at InDesign Magazine to post a reprint of the entire article.
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20 comments:
Awesome. Thanks! This is very helpful. However, do you have any advice on if the option indesign does not appear when going to tools > indesign? I've tried in both bridge and bridge cs3 and it does not appear. I checked the start up scripts and the one to create contact sheets is there for both contact sheets and to communicate with indesign. So it was diappointing not being able to create contact sheets. I've scoured the web in search of any troubleshooting advice and haven't found anything online similar to the problem I'm having.
Amanda, do you have the entire Creative Suite, or just Adobe InDesign? Adobe Bridge is installed with the standalone ("point product") InDesign, but the "workflow automation" scripts are not available in Tools > InDesign unless you have the entire Creative Suite.
I do have the entire creative suite. However, the print/design suite was installed separately than the web bundle through an educational license at school. I wouldn't think that would make a difference.
Amanda, I can't quite think of what might be going on with your missing "workflow automation" scripts. I think the place to start would be to uninstall all the parts of he Creative Suite from your computer, and then to a fresh install. This is a royal pain, but it is probably the place to begin. Good luck!
Hi There,
I am yet another user who would find these scripts very useful. I do have the Design Premium CS3 Suite. I can't find the Workflow Automation folder for the life of me!
Thanks for your help
Hey "Anonymous",
I'm sorry that you can't locate the workflow automation folder. Does Tools > InDesign > Create InDesign Contact Sheet appear in Bridge CS3, or is that missing also? If it is not missing, then try doing a search on your hard drive for "ContactSheet_ID.jsx". That should be in the workflow automation folder.
Thank you very much for the scripts.
I was wondering if there was a way to integrate the "Fit Frames to Graphics" into the contact sheet script itself.
I'd like it to run automatically after the contact sheet is created.
Is there a way to modify the script to take out the stroke around the text portion?
Nick, there is no need to modify the script to remove the stroke around the text captions. After the contact sheet is created, just modify the Object Style named "captions" so that the object style doesn't have a stroke, and all the caption strokes will be removed. To make this happen automatically, create an InDesign template with your desired style attributes.
I'm working on making the script as automated as possible. My people want the options preselected and they do not want the dialog box to show. We also want to save the contact sheets automatically to PDF.
I have figured out how to disable the display of the dialog and how to preset our many options (paper size, orientation, rows/columns, caption text, and others) but I'm having trouble with the PDF output.
We want the script to put files on the Desktop of the current user (~/Desktop/) under a generated name. I can create the filename to our specs, I've set the PDF preset, but I can't get InDesign to create the PDF.
As far as I can tell I'm filling in all the necessary variables. Can you point me in the right direction?
Never mind, I found the problem. I saved the "theScript" variable out to disk from a pass with my code enabled and a pass with the standard code. This revealed my mistake.
I have Bridge CS3 and InDesign CS3. I used this script all the time in CS2. Now, Tools > InDesign doesn't exist at all, much less the Create InDesign Contact Sheet part. I found the old CS2 script. Is there a way I can use it?
Eric, do you have the full Creative Suite, or just the InDesign CS3 "point product?" If you don't have the Suite, the "workflow automation" features in the Tools menu will not appear.
To remove strokes from frames or adjust fit to frame or fit frame to image you need to create an indesign template. Easiest way to do this is to run the contact sheet tool from bridge. Then delete all the content from the contact sheet. you will also need to delete the 3 grey swatches that will have been generated in the swatch palette. You then need to open your object style sheets palette and edit the 3 styles created by the script. Initially just turn the stroke colour to nothing. once you have this working you can try tweaking the other settings. Then save your file as an indesign template (.indt). Next time you create a contact sheet from bridge you can use this template as a base.
samuelson, most of what you've mentioned here is covered in the InDesign magazine article I wrote, available to download in the original post.
Keith, Great article and thanks for the scripts. Is there a way to set a default template file so that when the script is invoked in Bridge it will have an InDesign template already defined? You could uncheck the box to use the template or turn it off, but it would be great to have a default that a team could use, such as placing the template in a common path (a ~Home or My Documents folder).
Thanks!
It probably wouldn't be a big deal to further modify the script to look for and use a default template file. I could make this modification if someone has a business need for it and is willing to pay a few bucks for the change. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks.
Keith, what would the cost be for this modification?
Please contact me at kgilbert@gilbertconsulting.com, and I'd be happy to discuss the cost with you. Thanks.
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