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Our own Matt Mets put me onto this program called Montage from the open-source ImageMagick suite. Shown above is Matt's image "Things in my kitchen," and here is the command line to Montage that produced it:
montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 10x8 -borderwidth 1 -background white -bordercolor white -geometry 200x133 *.jpg stuff.jpg
As you can see, Montage takes all the work out of combining a bunch of individual images into an array of images, dealing automatically with all the resizing, cropping, arranging, and/or labeling headaches automatically.
Below is my own experiment with the software, "A visual guide to necklines," which I made because I never have any idea how to describe women's clothes.
Montage arrayed the images, added drop shadows, and labeled them based on their file names automatically. The only real work involved was tracking down the images online and saving them as appropriately-named files, but it wouldn't be hard to write a script to do that, either. Then one could conceivably go from a typed list of nouns to a complete visual index of those nouns completely automatically.
Photoshop does that. well maybe not the borders...it's called contact sheet.
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Of course Photoshop does it. So does iPhoto (for a tenth of the price). However, neither program is a good choice for complex, repetitive manipulations on large batches of images. Also, neither one is anywhere near as script-friendly as ImageMagick. Comparing these programs is like comparing screwdrivers and torque wrenches. Use each tool for what it does best.
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