# Generating thumbnail tiles using ffmpeg
> ffmpeg can unsurprisingly build contact sheets, too. Is there anything ffmpeg can't do?

I've been organizing my movie collection lately, and I needed a way to figure out what a video is all about without having to 
view & seek it.
Building a contact sheet is a simple solution for this. It places frames with from the video in a grid separated by 
an interval (like every minute) and you can quickly see what a video contains.

## ffmpeg tile filter

With anything media-related, I checked to see if ffmpeg supports this: it turns out, it has a `tile` filter[^tile][tile], which gives
us some primitives to work with.

## Covering the whole video

```shell
ffmpeg -skip_frame nokey -i video.mp4 -vf 'scale=320:-1,tile=8x8' -an -vsync 0 keyframes%03d.png
```

This creates n files, each containing 8x8 grid of keyframes from the video.
It's close, but I need a single file with tiles spanning the video from start to finish.

## 

```shell

```

[tile]: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#tile-1