Lightroom’s Print Module, believe it or not, is a great vehicle for putting together a photo collection for a quick email. All you do is make rows and columns and space them so that when you capture the screen, they’re all lined up as though they were in a contact sheet.

Start out by selecting only those images in the Grid or Filmstrip that you want to include in your contact sheet. If you’re sending this email to a client for approval, you may want to send all the pics in the shoot. If you’re sending it a your “friends” list to share the adventure of a journey, you may want to pick only a few special shots. The contact sheet I’m showing here is only 53 KB when it’s saved at a JPEG quality setting of 70. So you could make larger spreads, but I think you’ll find they’re more universally readable on screen if you just populate your shots across several “contact sheets” and then attach them all to only one or two emails. Here’s an example of one page of such an email.

The trick is to use a small number of rows and columns, like two across and three deep.

When you’re showing only a half-dozen or so images per page, even on your screen, you can easily see and appreciate the photos. They’re all clearly labeled with the original file numbers and a title…provided you entered a title in the metadata. You can always go back and do that before you choose Edit from the Custom Settings menu in the Overlays panel (see below). When you choose Edit you’ll get an Edit Dialog that offers to gather data from a lot of fields. Just click Insert in the order you want to see them in. You may want to put some spaces between the inserts, too. I also turned on the Identity Plate so my name could appear at the top of each page (never know who these might get passed around to) and then I turned on Page Numbers so that photos on each page could be referred to by number. Finally, I set the Font Size at 12 to make the font large enough to be readable in the screen capture.

Pre Lightroom 2 versions don’t let you print to JPEG files, so you’ll have to capture the screen preview panel. First, turn off all the panels to make the image size as large as possible, then use your screen capture program. If you’re lucky enough to have a capture utility like Snagit, you can probably crop out everything but the contact sheet itself and set all the JPEG output parameters (resolution, image size, quality) right there in the capture program. If not, just use your OS screen capture, open the file in Photoshop or whatever, and do those things there.

It’s really quick, it’s really easy, and by golly, you’ll really like it, too.