How do I make contact sheets with captions using Lightroom?

[Peter Weld]

For some years now I've been using a program called Image Buddy to make contact sheets on which every photo has a different caption. (They're individual photos of the students in a particular class at the university where I teach; the captions are the students' names.) Image Buddy had its quirks, but I was willing to put up with them because it did exactly what I needed it to do. Now that I've bought a new Macbook Pro with macOS Sierra on it, Image Buddy will no longer work, and I can't find any trace of KepMad Systems, the company that produced it.

So I'm trying to figure out how to make contact sheets with Lightroom 6. I understand how to select the student photos I need, switch to the Print module, and choose the number of rows and columns that I need. So far, so good. But how do I assign each photo an individual caption that moves with the photo if I rearrange the photos? I don't want to use the students' names as the names of the photos, so the "File name" option under "Photo info" doesn't help me. "Date," "Equipment," "Exposure," and "Sequence" are also not what I want, and "Custom text" seems to assign the same customizable caption to every photo on the sheet. The remaining options are "Caption" and "Title." How do these differ, and how can I use them to put each student's name below his or her photo on the contact sheet?

And one more question while I've got your attention: when I do print out a contact sheet with information below each photo—be it the date, the exposure, or something else—that caption seems to go mid-way between the photo above it and the photo below it. I want the caption to be closer to the photo above it than to the photo below it so that it's crystal clear which photo each caption belongs to. Any way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any help anybody can give me.

P. S. A Google search has led me to a program called ContactPage Pro 6 by Badia Software. It looks like it might do what I want to do, but it's US$60, and that's more than I feel like paying for such a specialized tool. (Image Buddy was US$19, as I recall.) Anybody have any other suggestions if I can't get Lightroom to do the job for me?

[john beardsworth]

You write the caption in Library's Metadata panel.

Then in Print, you choose Photo Info which is in the Page panel. But you can't choose where it is positioned - the Layout panel's cell settings can help though.

[Peter Weld]

Thanks, John. So you're saying that I type the student's name in the "Caption" box in the Metadata panel and then choose "Caption" from among the "Photo Info" options in the Print module's Page panel? That's great. Any idea whether I can move captions so that they're closer to the row of photos above them than to the row of photos below them?

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

That's exactly how it should be done, Peter. So you update the photo's title or caption or whatever in the Library workspace, which is where you manage photos. The Print workspace is about printing, not entering metadata like titles or caption, so photo info lets you pull the metadata into the print layout. I actually explained what to do about the spacing problem - the Layout panel has a number of options that will change how the caption and the photo relate to one another. So experiment with those settings, and when you're done just save your layout as a Template.

[Peter Weld]

Thanks a lot, John. That's a big help.

[Todd Shaner]

Peter Weld wrote:

Any idea whether I can move captions so that they're closer to the row of photos above them than to the row of photos below them?

Under Layout> use 'Cell Spacing.' This video and an article on using Collections should help.

Create a contact sheet | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC tutorials

Creating Contact Sheets with Lightroom Collections

[Peter Weld]

Many thanks, trshaner. I'll watch the video as soon as I have a chance.