ImageMagick Conversion Question

**ngrieb** · February 16th, 2011

I have been using imagemagick to convert a number of scanned jpg images into multi-page pdf documents. I love it and it works great, but I was wondering if there is a way to create the pdf in the some sort of ordered fashion. Right now I am simply doing:

convert *.jpg Document.pdf

but am wondering if I can use another argument to get the files arranged in alphabetical order or in timestamped order etc, because currently they are just randomly arranged. I'm sure there is something easy that I am missing.
Thanks in advance.

**tredegar** · February 16th, 2011

convert can read a file that is a list of file names to be converted in the order they are listed.
So all you need to do is create that list in the order you want.

So, to make the pdf of jpgs sorted by name try

Code:

ls *.[jJ][pP][gG] > filelist
convert @filelist Doc.pdf

Reverse sorted by name

Code:

ls *.[jJ][pP][gG] | sort -r > filelist
convert @filelist Doc.pdf

Sorted by modification time

Code:

ls -t  *.[jJ][pP][gG]  > filelist
convert @filelist Doc.pdf

I am sure there is a way to get rid of the intermediate step of storing the filenames in filelist by having convert read from STDIN but I can't make it work. If you can, tell me how.

find [options] *.[jJ][pP][gG] | sort [options] > filelist may be something else to play with (Eg find all jpgs created in the last week, sort them by name and convert them).

Have fun.

**ngrieb** · February 17th, 2011

Thanks, that is very helpful. I found my problem when I took a look at ls through the command line. As you probably already know the order of the files was different than the order shown in the file manager (I wonder why they do that)... i.e. pic-1.jpg is further down the list than pic-11.jpg, however, pic-1.jpg will show up ahead of pic-11.jpg in the file browser. All I had to do was prepend a 0, pic-01.jpg, before the 1 to make things right.