Updated 2025-08-25
Recently I needed to inventory a bunch of equipment at a client so I went armed with camera and took a bunch of pictures and notes and came home. Ultimately what I wanted was one or more files containing thumbnails of each image along with the filename below it to include in the report. I suspected that there was a command line way to do this – in Windows – and there is. Through the power of Cygwin (a surprisingly complete Linux CLI environment that runs on Windows), the magic of Imagemagick and the guidance from the post below, I created my own recipe.
http://blog.patdavid.net/2013/04/using-imagemagick-to-create-contact.html
Here is my command line to transform a directory of .jpg files into a few (3 in my case) contact sheets also in jpg format.
montage -verbose -label '%f' -font Helvetica -pointsize 16 -background '#ffffff' -fill 'black' -tile 3x4 -define jpeg:size=400x400 -geometry 400x400 -auto-orient *.jpg contact-light.jpg
Read the blog above and Imagemagick docs to explain the switches. I did change a few things in the blog’s example. I bumped up the resolutions of the images, (and hence the contact sheet) a bit, made it black text on white, bigger font, and limited the images to 3×4 pics per page using the tile options.
Since I used Cygwin on Windows I installed all the Imagemagick utils through the easy to use Cygwin installer, as well as Ghostscript and all the fonts I could find for it.
Below is the result.
Expanding the example, use the incredible fd tool to find files and pass them to montage to create a contact sheet from files in multiple directories. See my post on fd here.
fd -e png -X montage -verbose -label '%f' -font Helvetica -pointsize 16 -background '#ffffff' -fill 'black' -tile 3x4 -define jpeg:size=400x400 -geometry 400x400 -auto-orient *.png contact-light.jpg
This finds all the png files in the current directory and all subdirectories and passes them to montage to create a contact sheet named contact-light.jpg.
The -e png limits the search to files with the .png extension. Change as needed.
The -X option passes all the found files to montage in one go. The -x option would run montage once for each file which is not what we want here.
The *.png is needed to tell montage what files to process. The fd command passes the list of files found on the command line after all the options so montage sees them as if they were typed in on the command line.
The result is the same as above, a contact sheet named contact-light.jpg containing thumbnails of all the png files found.
The montage command is very powerful and has many options. See the docs for more information.
This is a very powerful way to create contact sheets from a large number of images in multiple directories.