Cheap and easy way to create a PDF document consisting of just photos?

March 20, 2015 4:50 PM

I'd like to create a single PDF document made up of 50 photos. Is there free or cheap way to do this without sacrificing quality? Thank you!
posted by Bushmiller to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

What platform are you on? If you have something like Word or Pages, you should be able to just make a document with each image full-page and then print to PDF.
posted by primethyme at 4:53 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Libre office is free. Put all your photos in one document and save as PDF.
posted by aniola at 4:54 PM on March 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Imagemagick is free:

$ for img in `ls *.jpg`; do convert $img $img.pdf; done
$ convert -compress lossless *.pdf single.pdf
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:04 PM on March 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, a lungful of dragon! That looks like what I need!
posted by Bushmiller at 5:20 PM on March 20, 2015

Imagemagick does a decent job on single images, but using the 'compress lossless' option results in a file ~6× larger than it needs to be.

josch / img2pdf does it right:

    img2pdf -o many.pdf *.jpg

Images are kept intact; even the EXIF data is kept. You can extract the images identically using pdfimages.
posted by scruss at 7:12 PM on March 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you're on Mac OS X you can use the Automator to create a workflow that goes something like

> Ask for Finder Items (check "Allow Multiple Selection")
> New PDF from Images
(and if you like) > Compress Images in PDF documents

and then hit "Run" and select your 50 photos.
posted by idlethink at 4:18 AM on March 21, 2015

Response by poster: Is there a Windows option for img2pdf, scruss?
posted by Bushmiller at 12:41 PM on March 21, 2015

Windows? Dunno. This looks like it might work: Installing Python on Windows; make sure you install pip as described on that page. Then from a terminal do something like: pip install img2pdf.

Though img2pdf works really well for JPEG images, the files get larger than they need to when using PNG. They shouldn't and that's bugging me.
posted by scruss at 1:13 PM on March 21, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks, scruss!
posted by Bushmiller at 1:56 PM on March 21, 2015

following a lungful of dragons above, this can be done in one line without a script with Imagemagick:

convert *.jpg output.pdf

works in OS X, linux, windows, and wherever fine command line tools are found.
posted by zachxman at 2:52 PM on March 22, 2015

Alternatively, you can convert all of your images to pdf using AVS Image Converter, then upload/combine each individual PDF with one another, using: this
posted by Grease at 8:49 AM on April 4, 2015