Digital Contact Sheets

Hot off the presses! I just learned this.
So I'm clunking around in PS making a digital contact sheet by hand for Rebecca's class and I think to myself (as I often do), "there's got to be a better way!"
Indeed there is. You can whip up a digital contact sheet in seconds using a highly underrated little program that installs itself along with photoshop: Adobe Bridge.
Bridge is basically amazing; its effectively a file browser built specifically for images. It lets you preview raw files, which is huge since windows doesn't natively support that (not sure about mac). Helps you index and rename large numbers of files and keep your picture folders nice and organized, and lots of other nifty features. But lets talk about contact sheets.

When you open Bridge (CS4) you'll notice four menu options at the top right of the window: Essentials, FIlmstrip, Metadata, and Output. Output is where all the magic happens. give it a click and you'll be treated to a window like the one I have here. There's lots of fancy options you can tweak at your leisure (you'll notice I'm set up to make 5 columns of 4 images each, with a maximum of 20 images per page. See how fun multiplication is!?) When you're done just click Save and viola!