Trying to package a directory of images into a pdf

Question

I have large image directories that I want to quickly package into a single pdf for portability across pretty much all devices. Following the instructions of other questions I have tried a variety of tools in conjunction with cutePDF to unsatisfactory results. I need a solution that:

• I can quickly tag a directory as the source of images
• The images are in alphabetical order by filename.
• The pages of the pdf are the size of the images. This is the biggest issue, pretty much everything I try shoves the images into a standard paper size. It either crops or shrinks it to fit, regardless of size, ratio, or orientation of the image.

Any thoughts? It will need to work on win 7.

Answer 1

This freeware tool seems to fit the bill : manga2pdf

Here is a little tool (manga2pdf) I wrote that takes a directory full of images (png, gif, jpeg) and makes a PDF out of it, with one image per page.

If you are into Python, then a simple script will do the job, as described in:
PDF a Directory of Images using Reportlab
Automatic import of images from a directory using a script

Otherwise, a commercial product that supposedly can do the job:
Image2PDF ($38)
7-PDF Maker : Although the site is in German, an English manual is available.

(Remark: I have not tried any of the above.)

Answer 2

You didn't specify what OS you are using, but this works under linux and likely under cygwin too. I think it is doing what you want. The images need to be tiff or be converted to tiff. The idea is to convert the tiff images to individual pdf files, then to concatenate the pdfs. For each tiff:

tiff2pdf -n input.tiff >output.pdf

Then

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

The -n option of tiff2pdf is for no compressed data passthrough, and appeared to do what you want. Other options might also work (didn't try them). You could wrap the above code in a script to process all images in a directory.

The utilities tiff2pdf and pdftk are also available for Windows platforms. See these links: tiff2pdf, pdftk, and an example of use.

You could also use Irfanview to convert a directory of images to pdfs. Use the Irfanview batch conversion/rename utility choosing pdf as the conversion output. You can choose the way the image is stored in the pdf (uncompressed, lossless compressed or several options of jpg quality.) You still need to use a utility like pdftk to concatenate the individual pdf files, but if the command line pdftk is not to your liking, try the gui pdftk builder and its collate function.