PDF Contact Sheet
Turn PDF pages into a thumbnail grid contact sheet
Files are processed only in this browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
Summarize every page as a grid of numbered thumbnails in one image
This PDF is password-protected.
Continue in another tool
Processing…
Everything runs inside this browser. Your file is never sent to a server.
Your file is ready to download
Continue with this result
Open page preview
Changing a setting hides the previous result. Run it again to save the latest settings.
Remove the password from an encrypted PDF first. Processing focuses on page content, so bookmarks, attachments, forms and signatures may not be preserved. Keep the original and check the result.
Working…
0.0
It hasn't frozen — the result will appear when the calculation finishes.
About PDF Contact Sheet
A contact sheet is what photo labs used to make from a roll of film: every frame printed small on one sheet so you could pick the good ones. This tool does the same for a PDF — it lays the pages out in a grid, labels each cell with its original page number and saves the result as PNG or JPEG.
Columns and rows each range from 2 to 6, and thumbnails can be 140, 180, 240 or 320 px wide. The default is 3 × 4 at 180 px. Pages that don’t fit continue on the next sheet, and multiple sheets can be downloaded together as a ZIP.
What a contact sheet is good for
It isn’t for reading. At 180 px an A4 page shrinks to about 30 % of its size, so 11 pt body text becomes roughly three pixels tall. What stays clear is the shape of each page: a blank page that slipped in, a scan that went through upside down, a chapter opener in the wrong place, the stretch of the document where all the figures are. You spot those at a glance on a sheet, and slowly by scrolling a viewer.
If you want headings to be legible, use 320 px thumbnails. That’s about 54 %, putting a 24 pt heading at around 13 px. The number under each cell is the page number in the original PDF, so a range of 10-20 is labelled from 10, not from 1.
Cell height follows the tallest page
Every page is scaled to the same width, and the cell height is set by the tallest thumbnail. A landscape page among portrait A4 pages sits low in the middle of its cell with space above and below — which conveniently flags it as the odd one out.
All selected pages are rendered as thumbnails before the sheets are assembled. For documents of several hundred pages that takes a lot of memory, so building the sheets in chunks with the page range is more reliable.
Worked examples
An 80-page reader with the defaults
- Input
80 portrait A4 pages, 3 × 4 grid, 180 px thumbnails, 14 px gap- Output
7 sheets of 596 × 1,178 px (the last one has 8 filled cells)
Twelve pages per sheet fill six sheets, and the remaining eight go on the seventh. Width is 14 × 2 margin + 180 × 3 + 14 × 2 gaps = 596 px. Each row is the 255 px A4 thumbnail plus a 22 px number strip, four rows plus margins and gaps give 1,178 px. Switching to 6 × 6 cuts it to three sheets (36, 36 and 8 pages).
How to use it
- Open the PDF and enter a page range if you only need part of it.
- Choose columns, rows, thumbnail width, gap and PNG or JPEG.
- Build the sheets, check them and download one by one or as a ZIP.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages fit on one sheet?
Up to 36, with a 6 × 6 grid. Anything beyond that continues on further sheets.
Can I get the result as a PDF?
No, only PNG or JPEG. If you need several pages per sheet as a vector PDF, use the N-up PDF tool.
Can I move the page numbers or change the font?
No. Numbers are centred under each cell in a 13 px system font.
Last reviewed: