Produce a Contact Sheet PDF within Mac Aperture

It's actually not too difficult to produce a proof sheet or contact sheet in Aperture, either as something you route to your printer so that there's never a digital copy or as a PDF document that you can then email to clients, make available at an FTP file repository, etc. Aperture does have a habit of making these pretty big, to maximize the quality of the individual photos, however, so that might prove a problem: A 22 page contact sheet I made as part of the testing for this article ended up about 850MB in size. That's a lot of PDF to send a client!

If you send something that large to a printer, of course, it just means that it takes that much longer to render and resolve properly, so it'll work but you might be a bit surprised that your usual page-per-90-seconds printer ends up taking three minutes or longer to product one of these contact sheets. Patience and experimentation are your friends. :-)

In Aperture, bring up the particular album or gallery you want to use and select either every image or just those that you want to share with your client.

In my case, here's what it looked like for a sporting event I attended a few months ago called the Pentathlon (modeled after a similar event in ancient Greece, for those history buffs out there):

With the desired images selected, choose "Print Images..." from the "File" menu:

(Don't worry, we can decide if we're producing a PDF or printout further in the process)

The print dialog window in Aperture is quite complicated, as you can see here:

On the top left you can see one of the choices is "Contact Sheets" (along with a ton of really useful automatic layouts just like school yearbook photographers and other portrait photogs use). Click on that, then you can tweak and fiddle with the Rows and Columns counts to make contact sheets that have a smaller number of larger images or a larger number of smaller images. I settled on four by four, as you can see.

Click on the "Print" button in the lower right.

Here's where you can decide if you want to produce a physical printout with your color photo printer or create a PDF that you can email to clients with ease. To produce a printout, simply click again on the "Print" button. Done.

If you want to make a PDF instead (which you can print later, of course) click on the "PDF" button on the lower left instead:

Lots of PDF options, but I have to say that 99.99% of the time I choose "Save as PDF..." and let Mac OS X do all the work. I'll do that here too.

Where to save it? I'll drop it on the Desktop and specify a memorable name (here I used "Pentathlon Contact Sheet"), then press "Save".

Time passes...

Done. PDF created. To view it I can use the preview function too:

Perfect, just what I want to share with clients. Hope that helps you figure out how to make proof sheets in Aperture too!

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