Quick Design: build a contact sheet from finished designs

This tutorial shows you how to turn a folder of finished designs into a contact sheet in one step using Quick Design. By the end you'll know how to flag a template, drop selected designs into it from Studio, let the system chunk large selections across multiple sheets, and optionally route the finished sheets straight to a Send-To preset.

What is Quick Design?

Quick Design is a way to batch-build contact sheets (or any multi-photo layout) from finished Studio designs without opening the editor. You flag any template as a Quick Design target, then select designs in Studio and send them into it. Templified fills the photo slots, renders each sheet in the background, and notifies you when they're ready. You stay free to do other work while the sheets are being created.

Step 1: Flag a template as a Quick Design template

Open the template you want to use for contact sheets in the editor.
Click the Template settings gear icon next to the template name in the editor header.
In the Template settings popover, find the Quick Design template toggle and switch it on.

The toggle saves immediately. A confirmation message appears briefly. Once enabled, this template appears in the Quick Design template list in Studio for everyone in your organization.

The Template settings popover with the Quick Design template toggle turned on

Any template with photo slots works — contact sheets, poster layouts, team composites, or any multi-photo grid. The number of photo slots in the template determines how designs are distributed across sheets.

Step 2: Select designs in Studio

Go to the Studio tab.
Click designs to select them. Hold Shift to select a range, or use Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Windows) to add individual designs to the selection.
A selection bar appears at the top of the grid showing how many designs are selected.

You can select designs from one folder at a time. Designs that have not yet been rendered will be rendered automatically before they are placed — you don't need to pre-render everything yourself.

Photos fill the sheet's slots in the order you select them — the first design you click lands in the first slot, the second in the next, and so on. Select in the order you want them to appear on the sheet.

Two-page designs contribute page 1 only. A contact sheet slot holds a single flat image, so a design that has a second page can't drop its stitched two-page PDF into a slot — only the first page of each such design is included. When your selection contains two-page designs, the Quick Design dialog shows an amber warning strip just above the footer: "N selected designs have 2 pages — the contact sheet will only include the first page of each." These page-1 images are rendered fresh for the sheet, so they never overwrite each design's own saved two-page PDF. See Two-page templates & PDF export.

Step 3: Open Quick Design

With designs selected, open Quick Design in either of two ways:

Right-click any selected design and choose Quick Design… from the context menu.
Click the Quick Design item in the folder actions menu at the top right of the folder view.

The Quick Design dialog opens. It shows a list of all templates in your organization that have the Quick Design flag on.

Step 4: Pick a template and review the field preview

Click the contact-sheet template you want to use. A template thumbnail and folder label help you identify the right one.
The dialog shows how the selected designs will be distributed: for example, "12 designs → 4 slots → will create 3 new designs." If you selected more designs than one sheet can hold, the remainder automatically overflow into additional sheets — no extra steps required.
Below the template list, the dialog shows any dynamic text or QR code layers in the template and how they will be filled.

How text and QR layers are matched

If the Quick Design template has dynamic text or QR code layers, Templified tries to fill them from the source designs automatically:

Auto-filled from source — layers whose field name matches a layer in the selected designs are filled automatically. The matched value is shown next to the layer name so you can see what will be used.
No source match — fill in optionally — layers with no matching source field show a text input. You can type a value (for example, a team name or event) or leave the field blank to keep the template's default. All sheets in the batch use the same value you type.

Sheet names are set automatically using the highest-priority matching text field from the source designs — so a batch for a Yankees folder produces sheets named "Yankees - Contact Sheet 1", "Yankees - Contact Sheet 2", and so on. You can rename sheets in Studio after they're created.

The Quick Design dialog showing a selected template, the slot and sheet count summary, the auto-filled and missing field sections, and the amber two-page warning strip above the footer

Step 5: Choose what happens after the sheets are created (optional)

If your organization has Send-To presets configured, an After creating Quick Design section appears at the bottom of the dialog:

Only notify me — the default. You'll get a toast notification when sheets are done; no automatic sending happens.
A preset name — pick any Send-To preset from the dropdown to route finished sheets there automatically. Two options then appear:
- Add to queue — stages the sheets in your Send-To queue for you to review and send when ready.
- Send automatically — sends each sheet to the preset as soon as it finishes rendering.

Your choice is remembered per organization on this browser, so you don't need to re-select it every time.

Step 6: Create

Click Create. The dialog closes immediately.
A progress toast appears: "Quick Design '[template name]' is running in the background — creating N designs…"
The app stays fully usable while the sheets render. You can navigate to other folders, open other designs, or continue working.
When all sheets are done, the toast updates with a completion message and a View action. Clicking View navigates to the folder that contains the new sheets and selects them so you can see them immediately.

Overflow: more designs than slots

When you select more designs than the template has photo slots, Quick Design automatically splits the selection into chunks and creates one sheet per chunk. If you select 20 designs and the template has 4 slots, you get 5 finished sheets — each holding 4 designs. The last sheet uses however many designs remain, so if the total doesn't divide evenly, the final sheet may have fewer photos than the others.

Sources without a completed render

If some of the designs you selected have not yet been rendered (for example, you just uploaded a photo but haven't sent the design yet), Quick Design renders them in parallel before placing them into the sheet. These renders count against your render balance the same as any other render.

Billing

Each contact sheet Quick Design produces is itself a render, billed at the standard render rate — the same rate as a render you create any other way. A batch that creates three sheets is three renders. Any source designs that still needed rendering (above) are billed too.