Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to convert a bunch of image
files to a PDF. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
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So a very common question that Mac users have is how to convert a bunch of JPEG files to
a PDF. The PDF is a pretty universal format and allows you to take a bunch of images and
put them into a single document. Then you know that that document can then be seen by
anybody with just about any device. There are many ways to do this using just the software
that's built into your Mac. You don't need anything special to do this. I'm going to
show you five different methods. The first one is the method most people recommend but
I think it's the least useful out of all of them. Then I'm going to show you different
options. Each one better than the last.
So the first method we're going to look at is the one everybody else tells you to use.
I think it's the least versatile and not even the easiest method. It's to use Preview. Preview
is pretty quick to get to. If you double click on any image file it's going to open it up
in Preview. If you select all of these and go to File Open, or Command O, it's going
to open them all in Preview. If you want to save them out as a PDF you can't just Export
it because what you have here is five different documents. But if you were to select all the
documents in the left sidebar, and you could turn the left sidebar to thumbnails by selecting
here, you can Shift Click on the last one and now you see all five of them are selected.
Now when you go to Print it's going to print all five. So I go to File Print, or Command
P, and I can see what the pages will look like if I print.
Now if I go to PDF down here I can Save as a PDF or Open in Preview. So we'll look at
what that PDF looks like. You can see now I've got a PDF that has five images in it.
So it gets the job done. Note that one way to make it a little better is to turn off
Auto Rotate here and now they're all going to be the same orientation.
So if you want the easiest method then all you need to do is go to a Quick Action. There's
already a Quick Action built into your Mac that will save out images as a single piece.
You can get to Quick Actions two ways. Let's select all these files and I can Control click
on one of them. You can see I've got Quick Actions and go to create PDF. I can also go
to View and then Show Preview. Then under Show Preview here you've got some Quick Actions.
You may or may not see this one of the top two. If not you can click More there. Click
on Create PDF there and you can see it creates a PDF instantly. So it's definitely the easiest
method to use. If I open up this PDF here you can see I get a nice PDF of all those
images. So no real options there but it's fast and easy.
Let's look at some more versatile ways to do it. One way to do it is to use Pages. So
let's run Pages here and I'm going to create a New Document and just going to have this
blank document here. Now I'm going to drag and drop these five images into the document.
When I do so I get a mess initially. I have all the images thrown in there on top of each
other. But while they're still selected there I'm going to go to Format, Arrange and change
the text wrap to In Line With Text. This will throw them all in there with text. There's
no text there right now. So it's just going to put one after the other. If I zoom out
quite a bit you can see now I've got just one image per page. If your images are smaller
you might fit two per page.
Now I can go to File, Print or I can do Export to PDF to get a PDF version of this document
that I see here. It's more versatile because now I can go in and I can make some changes.
For instance I can select all of these, just Command A to select all of them, and I can
go to Style and set a border. I can give a line, a picture frame. I can add shadows and
things like that. I can also add some text. I click there, you can see the cursor is there,
and I could start typing. Now I can add captions to it or just whole blocks of text underneath
these. You can take full control of these doing whatever you want with the images adding
text, adding text boxes, do all sorts of things. So you can use this as a quick way to get
a PDF from a bunch of images or to keep working with it to add more features.
You can also use Keynote for this and you'll get something that looks a little bit different.
So let's run Keynote here and create a new document and use something that's just a white
background there. What I'm going to do now is drag and drop these into the sidebar. So
I'm going to drag them in and drop them in there into the left sidebar to make slides
out of each one of these. Let's zoom out a bit here in Keynote and you can see that each
one basically fills the slide. Now I can also do Export to PDF or Print as a PDF. I can
do other things here as well. I could, for instance, create a text box and put text over
the image. So I could add a caption. I can make that white text for instance and copy
and paste that caption to each one of those. I can add more information. I could slides
in-between them. You can see I already have this title slide here. I can delete that.
But I could also use that as an extra piece of text. It's also easy to rearrange the images
once they're inside before you do the export. The results here looks a lot different than
what you get from Pages. The actual size of each page in the PDF is going to fit what
the slides are. You can, of course, adjust that by going to Document and changing the
slide size to Custom size and making something that's an 8½ by 11 ratio if you wanted to
look like a piece of paper. Things like that. So Keynote is probably the one where it's
the easiest to customize what you want and to add different captions and elements to
it. It's a little easier to do this here in Keynote than it is to do it in Pages.
The last method, I think, is the most useful of them all. It's to simply use Photos. So
when you go into Photos, of course, you can only print out images that you have in your
Library. So if they are not already there you can just simply import them in. Maybe
just import them in temporarily and get rid of them afterwards. But here I have an Album
that has those same five photos in it. So if I go to print here I get something very
different in terms of a print menu. I can choose between all these different ways to
lay it out. I can see here in Preview what it looks like.
So this is what it looks like with Fit. Fill fills it a little bit more. Custom goes and
puts several on a slide and I can change how many are on a slide by changing the numbers
here. The best is Contact Sheet because Contact Sheet puts them all there and allows me to
change the number of columns, and allows me to change the margins. I can Click Captions
and I can change what's in the captions. So here it's using the titles which are just
the file names. But I can add all sorts of other things to it like say the dates for
each one. So you get to put a lot of information with it and even choose some styles here of
how these look. Then when you go to Print you simply select PDF, Save as PDF, or Open
in Preview. This is what the PDF looks like. So you can put all the images on one page
of the PDF if that's what you want. You can have them on separate pages. You can combine
them and do all sorts of different things using the Photos app.