Ubuntu – Converting hundreds of jpg to PDF using Terminal

command lineformat conversion

I know that the command convert *.jpg myPdf1.pdf can convert multiple JPEG files into a single PDF.

But I would like to convert multiple JPEGs into multiple PDFs, for example:

myJPG1.jpg → myPDF1.pdf
myJPG2.jpg → myPDF2.pdf
myJPG3.jpg → myPDF3.pdf

Is there any decent way to manage something like that?

Best Answer

My first instinct for batch processing files is almost always find. It's excellent if you need to build in any sort of filtering (which you don't here) but it's still a favourite. This will also recurse into subdirectories unless you tell it (with -maxdepth 1 or other):

find -name '*.jpg' -exec convert "{}" "{}.pdf" \;
rename 's/\.jpg\.pdf$/.pdf/' *.jpg.pdf

The find/convert statement will output a load of .jpg.pdf files. The second cleans this up.

Perhaps a slightly more elegant approach in such a simple case:

for file in *.jpg ; do convert "$file" "${file/%jpg/pdf}"; done

This doesn't recurse and you don't have to mess around cleaning up the filenames.

And I almost forgot, ImageMagick has a numerical output which might fit your use-case perfectly. The following will just stick a three-digit identifier (000, 001, 002, etc) on the end of the "myPDF":

convert *.jpg myPDF%03d.pdf

Obviously if you're dealing with more than a thousand entries, increase the number. If you don't want it zero-padded, remove the leading zero.

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