2

I have thousands of JPGs (old OS X screenshots) I would like to convert to individual PDF's - one PDF per image file preferably using OS X Automator. This is in preparation for setting up an automated OCR using Hazel & PDFPEn Pro which will process the old backlog & any new incoming screenshots.

...the plan is that all future screenshots will be PDF format and automatically converted into searchable OCR PDFs so I can find content within them easily using Spotlight.

I am trying to create an Automator application to just drag the files onto, but after researching other similar StackExchange questions such as How can I convert JPG into PDF easily? ...I am only able to create a single PDF from all the images selected, which is not what I require.

It would be fantastic if someone could help me figure out how to create an Automator workflow/application to batch process images into a single PDF per image.

| improve this question | |
  • 2
    Welcome to Ask Different. Like all programming questions, if you dont get good answers, you can always post exactly what you have so far - best attempt at your script with the code nicely formatted. That often lets someone gauge what your next step or missing idea might be. Teaching the whole script from scratch tends to elicit - “hire a programmer” response when a question looks more like “who will do my work for free”? – bmike♦ Oct 29 '17 at 15:11
  • 2
    Since you have thousands of .jpg files to convert to .pdf, I'd suggest you install ImageMagick and use its convert command to process the files. IMO That is going to be the fastest way to handle such a large number of files. – user3439894 Oct 29 '17 at 19:17
  • 2
    GraphicConverter (GC) from Lemke is another option, but it may be that the batch processing is only in the paid version. You can create a batch script to do almost anything that GC can do manually. And it will do one file at a time. You can save the batch and run it again on a single file, a bunch of files, or a whole directory (still one file at a time). – WGroleau Oct 29 '17 at 21:23
  • Thankyou so much for these suggestions. @user3439894 - I was a bit daunted by your suggestion to use ImageMagick since it is a command line tool and I worried it may be beyond me. However, I installed it using this method macappstore.org/imagemagick which involved opening Terminal, running : ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" < /dev/null 2> /dev/null then brew install imagemagick. I tried following a video tutorial youtube.com/watch?v=LWwdNoh2aIA then realised it wasn't working... – Lull Oct 30 '17 at 19:32
  • So I searched and found that I needed to have installed Ghostscript as mentioned here : cactuslab.com/imagemagick I just ran brew install ghostscript and now it is working. I used mogrify -format pdf *jpg which seems to have done the trick! – Lull Oct 30 '17 at 19:34

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .