What Is a Contact Sheet?
A contact sheet is a grid layout of all the images from a single roll of film. In the traditional darkroom, photographers made contact sheets by placing negatives directly onto photographic paper to get a quick overview of every frame.
Latent brings this concept to the digital workflow, letting you generate a polished contact sheet from any shooting log that contains uploaded images. Contact sheets in Latent are designed to be both a personal reference tool and a shareable artifact you can post on social media.
Before You Start
To generate a contact sheet, the shooting log must have at least one image uploaded to it. If the log has no images, the Contact Sheet button will not be displayed. If you have not yet uploaded your scans, go to the log's detail page and upload images first. You can find instructions in the Image Management guide.
Generating a Contact Sheet
Open the shooting log you want to turn into a contact sheet. Click the Contact Sheet button on the log detail page.
Step 1: Configure Settings
In the first step, you configure the contact sheet:
- Image Selection: Toggle individual images on or off to include or exclude them. Use the Select All and Deselect All buttons for quick selection.
- Orientation: Choose between Portrait (vertical) and Landscape (horizontal) layout.
- Align: Choose whether images are aligned in Landscape (horizontal) or Portrait (vertical) orientation.
- Theme: Select Dark or Light theme.
Step 2: Preview
The second step shows a preview of the generated contact sheet with your selected settings.
Choosing a Theme
Dark Theme
The dark theme uses a black background with light text. It gives the contact sheet a moody, cinematic look that works well for street photography, portraits, and black-and-white film.
Light Theme
The light theme uses a white background with dark text. It produces a clean, minimal aesthetic that suits travel photography, nature, and color film.
Downloading and Sharing
From the contact sheet preview, you have the following options:
Download
Click the Download button to save the contact sheet as a JPEG image. You can then post this image to any social media platform.
Share (Mobile Only)
On mobile browsers, a Share button is available that uses the Web Share API. This opens the device's native share sheet, allowing you to share the image to other apps directly.
Share to X (Desktop)
On desktop, a Share to X button is available. Clicking it performs three actions:
- The contact sheet image is automatically downloaded.
- Post text is copied to your clipboard.
- The X (Twitter) compose page opens in a new tab via an intent URL.
You then attach the downloaded image manually and post.
Regenerating a Contact Sheet
After adding new images to a log or removing existing ones, you can generate the contact sheet again to reflect the updated image set.
Tips for Great Contact Sheets
- Upload all your scans from a roll before generating the contact sheet. Adding images after the fact requires regenerating the sheet.
- Choose the theme that matches the mood of the roll. Dark for atmospheric work, light for bright or colorful film.
- Fill in the location and notes fields on the log before generating, so the contact sheet metadata is complete.
- Use the contact sheet as a way to review an entire roll at once — it is often easier to evaluate your images as a set than one at a time.
Contact sheets are one of the most satisfying features of Latent, turning your archived rolls into something visual and shareable that captures the feel of a shoot in a single image. To create a contact sheet, you first need images attached to a shooting log — that guide explains how logs are created automatically and how to upload your scans.