Printing Picture Thumbnails

Well you have been busy with that digital camera,  taken hundreds of photos,  and downloaded them to your computer.   What now?

Well you may concider burning them to a CD or DVD .. good Idea .. and you can use the batch renaming tip in this issue to rename them in order.  However burning the photos on CD has a slight problem,  lets say you want to find a certain photo in a batch of 100 that are all called "Holiday 1-2-3-4 etc.

If you are using Windows XP,  you can print out a sheet with 35 thumbnail pictures each approximately 1 inch by 1 inch.

If you have a lot of pictures on a CD,  print thumbnails on a sheet to include with the CD.   Then you will know what is on that CD if you are looking for particular pictures.



Here are the steps.


Put all the photos that you want to print into the same folder.  If your pictures are organized in many different folders,  you may want to create a new folder and copy the pictures you want into there;  then,  the originals will stay organized,  and you can just delete the folder with the copies when you are done printing the thumbnails.

After you have copied all of the pictures into one folder, Open that folder and open the Windows XP Photo Printing Wizard.

On the left,  you should see a navigation pane.  At the top, check if it says Picture Tasks.   If it does not,   follow these steps:

Right click on a blank spot in the folder window.  Left click on Properties from the resulting menu.   Click the Customize tab.   Under,  Use this folder type as a template,  change to Pictures (best for many files).  Click OK.

Now you will see Picture Tasks on the left.

Under Picture Tasks,  click Print pictures.   This will open the Photo Printing Wizard.  Click Next.

By default,  all of the pictures will be selected.  For any pictures that you do not want to print,  click to remove the checkmark from the top right corner of that picture.  You can print up to 35 thumbnails on each sheet.  Click Next.

Under Which printer do you want to use,  if your printer is not shown in the box,  click the down arrow and click to select your printer.  Click Next.

In the Layout Selection page,  you will see Available Layouts.   Scroll down to select Contact Sheet Prints.  You will see the example in the Print preview pane on the right.  Click Next.