How to change aspect ratio of Preview Contact Sheet images?

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Level 1

70 points

How to change aspect ratio of Preview Contact Sheet images?

The disproportionate width/height scaling of images in the Contact Sheet is unacceptable! Perhaps some programmer found it easier to deal with squares, but they should have at least clipped or inset the original, proportionally-scaled image! This is what, one line of Objective C code?

No artist-type would ever find it acceptable! It would be okay for medium format shooters, but almost anyone else is going to hate it, especially iPhone users, who will have their 16:9 images stretched almost beyond recognition! And graphic artists RARELY work with square images. The whole historical basis for "contact sheet" is violated with the current behaviour!

Is there any way to change this behaviour? I'm a developer, and I'm desperate to fix this. Can I hack a .plist file somewhere, or perhaps use defaults(1) from Terminal?

If not, I beseech thee, PLEASE fix this BUG as soon as possible!

Mac Pro

Posted on Jul 17, 2022 10:59 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,495 points

Jul 18, 2022 5:25 AM in response to Bytesmiths

If you are referring to macOS 12.4, then I concur with Luis that the images appear correctly on the Preview contact sheet in their original orientation On the otherhand, you posted in the Catalina community and I can concur that all Images of any aspect ratio appear as distorted squares in Preview on macOS Catalina 10.15.7. The only defaults item you can change would be the PVContactSheetThumbnailSize property and that will not restore proper aspect ratio to the displayed images.

Apple is done providing operating system feature fixes to Catalina, and once Ventura is released this Fall, Catalina will drop off the supported operating system cycle. If you can, an upgrade to Big Sur or later should resolve this Preview contact sheet issue.

There are user supported public communities and the Apple product teams do not participate here.

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Answer 2

Jul 18, 2022 7:47 AM in response to Bytesmiths

I am sorry, yes, I am using Monterey, and I don't have access to a mac running Catalina.

As already noted, this is not likely to be fixed, as Catalina has only gotten security updates for a while now.

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Answer 3

Bytesmiths Author

Level 1

70 points

Jul 18, 2022 9:39 PM in response to dialabrain

Actually, in another thread I found on the topic of "contact sheets," someone turned me on to XnViewMP (https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/). Donationware for personal or non-profit use; reasonably priced for corporate/business use.

It does the job. It even opens the new RAW format for the new Olympus/OMDS OM-1 camera. Apple doesn't even do that, yet! (As usual, Adobe opens it poorly and makes it look awful.)

Thanks for all the help! Hopefully XnViewMP will be of help to someone.

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