Creating Alpha Sheets in ACDSee Photo Manager

If you count up and tag ALL the individual alpha files on your hard drive using ACDSee Photo manager, you could have a BIG project on your hands. I have a HUGE collection of alphas and I started out tagging just one letter and number of each set so I could get a quick look at everything in my "alpha" category. The only problem with that was sometimes I wanted to know if the whole alpha was the same color, and sometimes if it contained punctuation. Another problem was mixed up alphas - where NOTHING (or little) is the same -- I have about a dozen of these and they were really throwing me off.

Here is my solution: I created a contact sheet of each alpha and I tag THAT sheet. This way, I can see everything included in any alpha with one quick glance.

(Rhonna Penner's Old School Alpha - a good example of a mixed bag!)

Making a contact sheet is super easy. I'm using ACDSee Photo Manager 9 for these instructions.

1. Open the folder with the alpha in it.
2. Hit CTRL+I to select all images in the folder. If you get a few extras like a thank you graphic or perhaps a preview, just keep holding the CTRL key and click to deselect anything you don't want on the contact sheet
3. In the menus, click on create --> create contact sheet
4. Adjust the number of columns and rows (circled on upper left in screen shot below) until everything will fit on one page (indicated in center bottom of screen shot below, under the thumbnails of the alpha files)
   
5. Designate a filename for the contact sheet. I call all of mine "alpha" because I use the properties database to record the kit and designer name (more on that tomorrow) but you can name them however you want. Click on the browse button (circled below, on the right of the screen shot) under "output path" to give it a file name. The folder the same as the default so it will go to the folder containing the individual alphas and then click "save" in that dialog box and then OK in the lower right of the create contact sheet page.
   
6. You will now have a contact sheet in that same folder! THIS is what you can put a tag on so you can see the entire contents of the alpha set.
7. To use an alpha, after you've found the contact sheet that contains the whole collection from your tags, right click and select "go to file"...voila, you are there with all the individual files!

Here are a couple other useful ways to use the create contact sheet function:

• Designers - include a contact sheet with your digital downloads
• Create a contact sheet of photos/layouts/kits that you have archived to disk. I print a sheet for every CD/DVD I burn and keep it in a 3-ring binder
• Create a contact sheet for a set of digital scrapbook embellishments and tag that instead of every individual element in the kit. This is especially useful when the items are all in the same category but are different versions or colors of the same basic idea, like this set of frames.

Tomorrow, I will be back with a simple method of getting ACDSee to spit out credits info for you! This is a streamlined version of some things I learned from digiscrapinfo and how I use ACDSee photo manager to make my scrapping faster and more organized.

If you don't have this program, maybe now is the time to get it! There are some great specials going on and when you click from the link below, I get a small commission for sending you there (THANKS!)