Windows 10 Tip: Print Thumbnails of All Pictures in a Folder

By | September 1, 2018
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Windows 10 Tip: Print Thumbnails of All Pictures in a Folder 

Back in the day of film photography, there was something  called a contact sheet. A contact sheet was a single print of everything on a roll of film. In the age of digital photography, Windows 10 makes it easy to print a “contact” sheet of thumbnails of all pictures in a folder. And it’s really easy to do.

With its default settings you can print 35 thumbnails on a single sheet of standard size printer paper — which in the USA is 8.5 inches by 11.0 inches. If you have more than 35 pictures in a folder, it will print them on another sheet of paper. For instance, if you have 100 pictures in a folder, 35 thumbnails will be printed on the first piece of paper, 35 on the second and 30 on the third.

If you’ve ever wanted to print quick contact sheets of all pictures (as thumbnails) in a folder, here’s how to do it on Windows 10:

Open the folder which contains the pictures you want to use to make your contact sheet.

Select the pictures you want to be on the contact sheet. If you want all the pictures in a folder, select one picture then press CTRL+A.

When all the pictures you want to print as thumbnails on a contact sheet are selected, right-click on one of the selected pictures and choose “Print” from the right-click menu:

Cloudeight Windows 10 Tips

The Print Pictures dialog will open. Your printer will be selected. You can choose Paper size, Quality, and Paper type. The defaults on this computer are “Letter” for the size, “Normal” for the quality and “Plain paper” for the paper type . You can adjust these to your specs.

From the icon menu on the right in the “Print Pictures” dialog, choose “Contact sheet” (the bottom icon in the menu):

When you click the “Contact sheet” icon you’ll see a preview of your contact sheet appear in the window. This is a preview of the first page of thumbnails.  For this tutorial I chose 35 images in a folder… that is one printed sheet.

Cloudeight Windows 10 tips

Choose the number of copies of the contact sheet you want to make and click the “Print” button to print your contact sheet.

15 thoughts on “Windows 10 Tip: Print Thumbnails of All Pictures in a Folder

  1. RICHARD SZPIN

    Very nice and useful if you have a small batch of photos. Problematic if you have 100’s…but then if you have 100’s, it could be a good idea to spring clean: delete and organize.

    Reply
  2. Cedric Moroukian

    This is all very well but can somebody please tell me how to create thumbnails? I have a few gmail icons on my desktop that I want to change to photos.

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      Icons are already special kinds of images… but their special types of images with an .ico file type – each icon contains several images of different sizes. This tip was not about printing thumbnails of icons, this was a tip about printing a folder of standard images (for example .jpg, .png, .gif images types). File Explorer will automatically show thumbnails of these types images unless you change the default settings. Icons are a whole different animal.

      Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      It works with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and any version of Windows 10.

      Reply
  3. Scottie

    I like that, but since the 1809 update, my computer won’t show the pictures in a file. I tried making the Pictures a default , but it didn’t work.

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      Easy fix… Open-File Explorer. Click on “View”, click on Options > Change folder and search options. In Change folder and search options, click the view tab and uncheck “Always show icons, never thumbnails”.

      Reply
  4. Christina

    the pictures are not printed in order on the contact sheet (at least not sorted by name, I don’t know if there is another order used) – is there a way to sort them?

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      You must sort the folder by name first. They are sorted by Windows the way you choose to sort them – date, name, size, etc.

      Reply
  5. Steven Richardson

    One problem, if the pictures are different size Windows reorients them to fit. This turns some on their side. Is there a way to keep the original orientation?

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      Windows offers basic features. There are many programs that will do what you need, but none I can recommend at this time.

      Reply
  6. Pam, Secretary

    This did not work on my system for some reason, it gave just blank pages even though I selected all the images.

    Reply
    1. infoave Post author

      All I can tell you is this is a standard Windows tip – we have used this tip on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11. Now we only support Windows 10 and 11 and it works on both of my Windows 10 computers and my Windows 11. It’s impossible to tell why it doesn’t work for you.

      Reply

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