I saw this post on the Inside Lightroom blog and replied to it about using Lightroom to generate PDF contact sheets and thought I’d mention a bit more about it.
I found myself having to distribute a few contact sheets a month or two back and discovered that the Print module in Lightroom is quite happy to use the PDF driver for output. This is a neat feature and does mean that you can use the Print module to generate really nice contact sheets. Lightroom does a lot of the grunt work for you and allows you to add the required metadata. This proved to be really useful as I wanted to generate a contact sheet that had copyright info for each image (as there were three different photographers on the sheet). As each image had full IPTC metadata, this was a snap. I just clicked the “Photo Info” checkbox and created a new preset that showed the copyright and image name.
The contact sheets were generated using draft mode. Using the full quality mode seemed like overkill and took about 10x longer for very minimal gain.
I’m using Lightroom more and more for catalog management and iView MediaPro less and less. I guess there’s going to come a day when I just shut the door on MediaPro altogether. That’d be a shame but Microsoft seem determined to keep Expression (which is what MediaPro became after the iView acquisition) stuck in first gear. Once Adobe add scripting to Lightroom, it’ll be really indispensable.