contact sheet of faces only?

[acsi]

hi everyone, i'm new here, so i hope this is the right place to ask. i'm a veteran of the internet, and software in general, but very new on the photo side, so i hope to learn a lot here.

i'm trying to make a "thank you card" photo for a post-birthday party mailing. probably 5x7 print sent out in a larger envelope of a montage of scenes from the party. the idea i had was to use the hollywood poster concept-- massive thick letters with the image inside the letters, black everywhere else.

to summarize the party, i figured i'd include the words JACK'S BIRTHDAY, in a font as big as will fit on a 5x7, then include an array of scenes, tiny of course, from the party, like little chicklets, fitting inside the letters.

my problem is that instead of creating a contact sheet and sliding it behind the letters ( or pasting-in in photoshop after selecting the letters layer ) i want to choose just the faces, or interesting parts of the few hundred photos i took. so picking my favorites, making a contact sheet-- it just seems that many of the faces will be so small as to be useless. It doesnt matter of some chickets get cut off, i just want a multi-piture grid, with the font superimposed on top. ( or the photo contact sheet fitting inside the boundaries of the font, whichever way i should say it )

now, i could crop each and every photo, but that would be many dozen.

is there a way to help automate the following:

1.choose, say 40-50 great photos. (manual)
2. open photo 1
3. visually choose the most interesting part ( mostly faces )
4. draw a selection around that part
5. how do i save the selection as a file in photoshop?
6. repeat for all pictures
7. assemble an array/grid/matrix/contact sheet with almost no border or space in between, composed of the "areas of interest" pictures only, not the original ( larger) photos?

maybe there's no solution other than grunt copying and cropping, which is fine, but i figured i'd see if i was being oblivious to the power of photoshop cs2 and the actions feature.

thanks for any ideas!

[Littlecoo]

Best I could think of was to go through your images and perhaps make marquee selections(maintaining same aspect ratio for each) of the bits you want, save as new files and make a contact sheet of these. I found this link useful when I was doing something similar myself a while back. I hope this helps you

[acsi]

thanks. i ended up using picasa to make a grid ( create:picture collage etc) to get them all lined up in an 8x8 matrix.