The two blogposts in which I explain how to create this template have in no time become the most visited and commented pages on the blog.
And it is nice to see readers helping each other out, and as was the case with reader Scott, even offering suggestions on taking the template even further.
One of the limits of the template is that if you have squares in one row, you’ll have squares in all the rows. Rectangles in one row means rectangles in the others as well. That is, up until Scott – to whom I credit most of this blogpost – unleashed Excel’s Goal Finder on the problem (never thought I’d be naming good old bureaucratic, number-crushing Excel and creative Lightroom in the same blogpost, but here we go) and came up with a way to take the template even further. Scott’s method offers a way to include both square and rectangular photos in the template, and I’m sure the mathematically enlightened will find ways to take Scott’s enhancements further again! If you do, please let me know, and we’ll post an update. Heck, if this goes on, we might dedicate an entire blog to the template 
.
I’d really love to have done a video on it, but bandwith here in Indonesia is not very forgiving on high-volume uploads so you’ll have to do with this detailed (again, courtesy of Scott) step-by-step plan. The trick is actually to make two templates of 50 mm high by 200 mm wide: one with 1 column and 4 rows (the ‘squares’) and one with 1 column and 3 rows (the ‘rectangles’). You then export 2 times 4 pictures with the square template, and 2 times three pictures with the rectangular template, using Lightrooms ‘Print to JPG’ feature.
Then, you reimport the 4 resulting 50 mm x 200 mm JPGs (shown above) (strips, as I’ll call them below) and put them in yet another template (a 4 rows x 1 column one this time) on a 200 x 200 mm page. It actually sounds harder than it is, and I think it is a very cool example of doing extremely versatile things only using Lightroom and… Excel (although using some good old-fashioned math you could probably do it with a piece of paper as well…)
So here’s the procedure in 10 steps! Be sure to check out the previous videos if you don’t know how to add the text using Lightroom. Of course, the template works equally well (and is even easier) to do without text, using pictures only.
- In Lightroom, define a new page size of 200 mm x 50 mm. See the previous videos (for Mac) or the comments in the previous posts (for Windows) on tips for how to do that. It’s actually the most difficult part, as it seems to vary between operating systems and printers.
- (This second step is optional, for those who want to experiment with other aspect ratios, as Scott has already found out the dimensions for this specific template). If you just want to use Scott’s version of the template, go to step 3.
Create an Excel sheet to make sure that measures of cells are the same. In order for the template to work properly, the height of all pictures must be constant – in this case 50mm. With a constant inter-picture spacing of 1mm, the challenge is how to figure out each picture’s width (the pictures in the 1×3 rows would have one width, while the pictures in the 1×4 rows would have another width) so that the total width of each row equals 200mm. Scott wasn’t in the mood to do the math in his head, so he let Excel do the works using the Goal Seek function.
This resulted in an almost-square aspect ratio (a width of 49,25 mm x a height of 50 mm) for the 1 row x4 columns strip. For those of you who want the math: 4 times 49,25 + 3 times 1 mm (for the spacing (4 squares have three spaces in between them) = 200 mm. For the rectangular-photo strips; the math resulted in a rectangular shape of 66 mm wide x 50 mm high (3 x 66 mm + 2 x 1 mm for the in-between spacing also equals 200 mm!) - Crop 8 pictures at the 49,25/50 ratio for the 1st and 3rd strip. (If you only need the aspect ratio for the template, but you don’t want to mess up the original crop you had given the picture, be sure to make a virtual copy before cropping it to the 49,25 x 50 aspact ratio. By the way, if you plan to re-use this template a lot, you can set the 49,25/50 aspect ratio as a preset in the crop-tool.
- Crop 6 pictures at the 66/50 ratio for the 2nd and 4th strip. (Same remarks as in step 3 apply)
- Define a 1×4 template in the Print Module (all margins = 0, horizontal cell spacing = 1mm, cells = 49,3 mm x 50 mm).
- Define a 1×3 template in the Print Module (all margins = 0, horizontal cell spacing = 1mm, cells = 66 mm x 50 mm).
- Export each row as its own JPG after selecting the appropriate pictures.
- Import the 4 resulting ‘strips’ back into Lightroom; each is 200mm x 50mm.
- Define a 4 Row x1 Column template in the Print Module (I’d set the margins to zero, but you can set them to whatever you want. Be sure though to put the vertical cell spacing to 1.3 mm. (There is no horizontal cell spacing as there’s only 1 column). Cell size must be 200 mm x 50 mm. I actually grouped the three templates (the two for the strips and the one that combines the 4 strips into the final result) under 1 Template Folder (4 x 4 uneven card (which is actually an ill-chosen name, as I now realise, ‘Square card 4 – 3 – 4 – 3 might be more suitable) in Lightroom.
- Select the 4 200 mm x 50 mm strips to populate the cells on this sheet and print to a printer (or to a JPG as desired).
P.S. In my twisted mind – and somewhat helped by a Bir Bintang Besar (Large Bintang Beer) – I begin to see opportunities for taking Scott’s ideas yet further again, by allowing to break the symmetry even more, and for example allowing the first row to be five 4 x 4 cm squares (no spacing), and the second row 2 rectangles (one 4 x 8 rectangle and 1 4 x 12 rectangle). This would involve a plain 5 x 5 square template where the ‘rectangular pictures’ would actually be faked by putting a picture, and a carefully displaced virtual copy of that picture (or two crops (one carried out on a virtual copy) of the same picture), next to each other. However, this is so far-fetched and cumbersome that I will not even begin to explain it. From a certain point, it’s better to make a template in Photoshop or Indesign. I just wanted to include the PS to say that, the better you get to know Lightroom and the way the different modules work and interact with eachother, the more possibilities will come to mind for doing things you first thought were impossible. Although I’m pretty sure you will never be able to solve math problems with Lightroom
