Contact sheets with metadata in InDesign

While we normally use Bridge to create simple contact sheets, if you need to see the metadata of your image in your contact sheet, you will need to do this in InDesign, as explained below.

Test contact sheet

It is useful to first create a test contact sheet to see how much metadata you want to output. The more metadata you add, the smaller the images will appear on the page.

1. In InDesign, without opening a new document, go directly to Window > Utilities > Scripts.
2. Within the Script panel, open the Application > Samples > JavaScript folder and double click on ImageCatalog.jsx script.
3. Select the folder containing the images you want to test this on, then click Open. (Choose a folder containing no more than 12 images for the sake of this test).
4. Choose your preferred amount of rows and columns but don’t change anything else at this point and just click OK.
5. You will notice in the basic setup below that the graphic frames have different proportions and not all the image names are visible on the page. This is because these file names are too long and thus result in overset text frames.
6. In order to see how much room is needed for the captions, delete the box containing the filename of one of the images on the page.
7. Select the corresponding image and choose Object > Captions > Caption Setup.
8. In this instance, I am using three Metadata fields: Name, Keywords, Actual PPI. (You can add or remove as many fields as you want by clicking on the + or the – symbol at the right of the window).
9. Under Position and Style, you can also specify the distance between the image and the caption (I have chosen 10pt Offset here). You can also create your own Paragraph Style.
10. Click OK when you’re done
11. Now apply the caption by selecting your image and choosing Object > Captions > Generate Static Caption. (Note: if the resulting text frame says <Multiple intersecting links>, this means the text frame is probably touching other images and you’ll need to move the other images away)
12. You can also measure the total amount of space that is needed to position the caption by using the Measure Tool (under the Eyedropper Tool). The info panel will pop-up automatically and tell you the total distance (about 116pt height in this case).

Live contact sheet

To create a new contact sheet page, double click the ImageCatalog.jsx script and choose the folder containing your images. This time we will change a few settings.

1. Choose the desired number of rows and columns, then type in your desired text box height in the Vertical Offset field. (In this case, I have chosen 116pt as per my previous test). This will add enough space in the contact sheet to be able to add the captions later.
2. Deselect the Frame to Content check box if you want the image frames to be a uniform size. 
3. You can also deselected the Labels checkbox as you’ll be adding the file name later as part of the metadata. This will avoid a double entry.
4. Click OK. You now have a contact sheet that has evenly spaced images but is still missing the captions. 
5. Set up the captions for this document using the same method as for your test contact sheet (see above steps 7 to 10).
6. In order to apply this caption to all the images in one go, select all the images on the page, choose Captions > Generate Static Caption.

You should now have a contact sheet containing all the metadata you need.