ContactPage XT, US$89.99
Macintosh only

For many years now, the bulk of my production work has been in creating product catalogues of all different types, and I'm always trying to find some way to get out of doing the vast majority of the manual labor. Big Picture XT is one that stumbled on when we decided to change the format of all of our images, but this last issue I found a new can't-live-without XTensions module. ContactPage XT, also from Badia Software, the easy way to make proofing pages of folders full of images.

Figure 1 The main dialogue box enables you to set the document size, the pictures to import, the grid pattern, the placement of captions, and more.

Figure 2 In the pictures pane of the dialogue box, choose the folder and subfolders from which you wish to import the images.

For the last catalogue, we already had the images from the various manufacturers, and had set the size and resolution in Photoshop. What we really needed was a printed document containing every image so that we could choose the images we wanted, but also to refer to in the future when we needed to select images for a marketing piece.

Figure 3 In the grid pane, set the number of columns and rows for the picture boxes.

ContactPage XT, like its sister product, BigPicture XT, is extremely simple to use, and is the quickest way to create contact sheets of pictures with captions. Direct it to a folder containing images (optionally include the subfolders), choose your page-layout options, and ContactPage XT will generate QuarkXPress projects that are fully editable. (The captions feature included the name of the image, so finding images on our server was always easy.)

Figure 4 In the captions pane, you can dictate the placement of the picture captions.

The customizable features enable the user to choose page size and margins, grid layout, picture-and text-box dimensions, and some really extensive caption information. For additional ease, a resume-cataloguing feature enables the generate process to complete later if interrupted.

Figure 5 The resulting contact pages are definable by the number of rows and columns for the picture box and caption grid, and an interactive preview gives you a look before you commit.

Customize the picture-box width and height, shape (rectangular, rounded, beveled, concave, or oval), and picture captions can contain picture number, name, image size, format (EPS, TIFF, and so on), color model (RGB, CMYK, grayscale, and so on), and image resolution.

You can also add any custom text as a prefix and/or suffix to the picture-file information. Positioning of the caption is user-definable as well and, using style sheets, you can make global style changes in a snap.

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