Which contact sheet generator can be scripted?

Solution 1:

montage (part of the imagemagick package) can do this.

The options are exhastive so i thoroughly recommend running man montage but here's an example I pulled to show off the perverse level of detail you can go into:

montage -size 400x400 ~/Pictures/2008/Sept/*.JPG  -thumbnail 200x200 -font /var/lib/defoma/gs.d/dirs/fonts/Vera.ttf  -set caption '%t' -bordercolor Lavender -background grey40  -gravity Center   -pointsize 9  -density 144x144  +polaroid  -resize 50%   -set label ''  -background white  -geometry +1+1  -tile 5x  index.html

It makes both a webpage and a contact image.

Solution 2:

For interactive use, feh takes the prize, especially if you're dealing with a lot of images. feh -t images... and you're off. Has options to easily control thumb and total sizes, and the thumbs are clickable through to the real thing.

For printing, feh works, but montage (as per @Oli's suggestion) is probably more dependable as it handles more image formats than feh.

For completeness I should mention that gimp-plugin-registry has a plugin for Gimp ("Contact Sheet 2.0") that produces contact sheets from a directory of images, which is relatively user friendly.