How To Convert Multiple Images To PDF In Ubuntu Linux

You have several documents or images scanned individually and you need to save multiple images to one PDF file. If you Google, you will find many online websites for this purpose. But they are either not free or they will put their watermark on the final PDF file. You don’t want it, do you?

I had this need when I had to apply for a job and they required me to upload a single PDF file consisting of several documents. My problem was that I had documents scanned individually but not in one file. It’s just one of the example where you may need to convert multiple image files in one PDF file.

If you are using Ubuntu then many people would suggest to use the command line tool Image Magic. But if you prefer a GUI tool over command line, gscan2pdf that is the perfect tool for merging multiple images into one PDF file. We shall see both methods in this tutorial.

1. The GUI way to convert multiple images to PDF in Ubuntu Linux

In this tutorial we’ll see how to convert multiple images to PDF with gscan2pdf. Though the tutorial is performed in Ubuntu 14.04, it should be valid for earlier or newer Ubuntu versions as well as other Linux distributions based on Ubuntu such as Linux Mint and elementary OS.

Install gscan2pdf in Ubuntu:

Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the following command to install gscan2pdf:

sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf

How to convert multiple images to PDF with gscan2pdf:

Once installed, open gscan2pdf by searching for it in Unity Dash:

Once gscan2pdf is opened, you can select all the required files in it by clicking on the Open Files. By default  it is arranged in alphabetical order but you can drag and drop to reorder the images as per your choice. Once done, you can click on the Save icon to save the files to PDF.

When you hit the save button, the next screen might look confusing. Actually it provides you option of putting metadata in the document such as author, date etc similar to a word document. If you just want a PDF file, hit the save button. Since by default the output file is PDF, you don’t need to bother a lot here. Just choose where to save the converted file.

2. The command line way to convert multiple images to PDF in Ubuntu Linux

If you want to go the command line way, you can use ImageMagick. It’s very easy to convert several images into one PDF file this way as well.

Open a terminal and install ImageMagic using the command below:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Once you have it installed, use the ‘convert’ command line tool of ImageMagic. Just provide the paths to individual images and at the end of the command, name the output file. For example, something like this:

convert image1.jpg image2.png image3.bmp output.pdf

That’s it. Nothing more to be done. Cool isn’t it? :)

Did it work for you?

I hope this article helped you to merge multiple images into one PDF in Ubuntu Linux. If you are further interested, check this article to know how to edit PDF files in Ubuntu Linux.

Questions, suggestions, a word of thanks is always encouraged.