First Contact — Reengineered

The latest version of First Contact, which is out now, has been in development for a over a year, and represents a nearly complete rewrite of the app from the ground up. The original contact sheet rendering engine has been scrapped, replaced with a brand new one that renders faster and produces smaller, higher quality PDFs. The layout settings have been expanded with the addition headers & footers, tokens, and more.

The Rendering Engine

First Contact's new rendering engine provides instant feedback to layout changes. Updating the number of rows, changing a font, or adding new images no longer require rendering the the contact sheet. Previewing images and estimating the PDF size now take full advantage of multi-core CPUs so the app stays responsive. Additionally it's more flexible allowing for a stronger foundation for future updates.

Rendering contact sheets isn't just faster, but also higher quality. The rebuilt Compressor can render higher quality images at a fraction of the file size, even when embedding full resolution images. For the times file size is of upmost important images can be resampled to create the smallest possible PDFs suitable for emailing.

Layout Options

First Contact now includes one of the most requested features: headers and footers.

Both have leading, centered, and trailing components and can be styled separately with different font families, sizes, and colors. Add tokens with dynamic information the current date, image count, page count & number, and PDF metadata, and more. Tokens, when combined with saved layouts, allow you to create templates for your clients or studio for consistent contact sheets.

Image labels also have the same styling options, and the small, but important addition of optionally excluding the file extension.

Availability

The update is available to download now and through the in-app updater. This release of First Contact also introduces a new licensing system which allows for easier license management from within the app. If you're an existing customer a new license code is being emailed to you. If you have any questions please reach out.