AboutScott Valentine Expertise Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Peachpit)". Beginning to expert questions for Photoshop CS3 and CS4 Extended, including 3D capabilities. I am also an expert here for Digital Photography. Please - NO questions on Lightroom, Elements, Express or versions earlier than CS2. These questions will be discarded.
Experience Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4" (available from Peachpit.com in January, 2009). I have been a professional level user since 1999, and have used Photoshop for photography, fine art, graphic design, web design, and technical image analysis. I have also conducted classes at the college level in both artistic and technical uses. I am currently an Adobe User Group manager.
Organizations National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Los Alamos Multimedia Users Group.
Publications CommunityMX.com, Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Adobe Press).
Education/Credentials Bachelor's degree, Physics
Awards and Honors Several awards for digital photography.
I have some users experiencing issues with the contact sheet option. As they need to create some sheets from a folder containing a dozen of pictures, when they use the contact sheet option, it will render what they need and then an uncloseable error message appears and the only way to get rid of it is to force quit photoshop (and naturally lose the project).
Strange thing is that we manage to see the pictures and filenames behind the error message. And when we uncheck "load with caption" it will work perfectly.
Having it working without caption I was pretty sure it was a font problem, so I went checking out suitcase to make sure everything was fine, and it was. I also tried trashing preferences without any result neither.
Would you have any idea of what it could be?
Answer Interesting problem, Patrick.
After a basic search, it seems that the issue is not unheard of, but still kind of rare. I could not find any explanations, and the only 'cure' was to reinstall PS. The text of the error reads: "Could not complete your request because of a program error", and the OK button does not close the dialog box. Let me know if I'm chasing the wrong issue :)
However, I did find an alternative, which is to use InDesign and Bridge. If you have them, you can select the images you want in Bridge, then choose Tools > InDesign > Create InDesign Contact sheet. It's not perfect, but it may be worth investigating.
I also recommend making sure you have any patches for CS3 and your OS installed (it seems the issue occurs from 10.2 through 10.5.1). If that still doesn't work, let me know and I'll ping some other resources - or you can try the Adobe forums or tech support.
One caveat about reinstalling; if you have lots of preferences or custom configurations, save them out to a backup (brushes, other presets and preferences file) before reinstalling. If you haven't done this before, a quick web search will give you specifics for your environment.
I hope this helps, but don't hesitate to respond if you need more help.
