Contact sheet / selects
A contact sheet shows every frame at a glance; selects are the smaller shortlist chosen for editing, review, or delivery.
See it
What it is
A contact sheet is an overview of every frame from a roll or shoot, arranged in sequence so patterns and near-duplicates are easy to compare. In the darkroom it was made by placing negatives directly on photo paper; today it is usually a grid of thumbnails. Selects are the smaller set marked for editing, delivery, or a second review. The book Magnum Contact Sheets made photographers' marked-up sheets part of the story.
Reach for a contact sheet before retouching when a shoot has too many similar frames to judge one at a time. Compare expression, gesture, focus, and continuity across the grid, then make a generous first pass and a tighter final shortlist.
Gotcha: selects are decisions, not merely the highest technical scores. A perfectly sharp frame can lose to one with the right expression, and ten nearly identical choices push the decision onto the client. Keep file names visible and never rename between selection and delivery.
Ask AI for it
Build a numbered contact sheet in Adobe Lightroom Classic's Print module with the Contact Sheet/Grid layout: place every frame in capture order, show the filename under each thumbnail, and keep equal cell sizes. Mark the strongest frames with Pick flags, then output a second page containing only those selects with their original filenames intact.