Ytdyklly

On a Mac, how can I sort about 2400 jpg according to their creation date (i. e. stat -f %SB) via terminal and convert them in that order into one pdf?

What if one jpg has been created today at 11:10 pm and a second one shortly after within the same minute at 11:10 pm? Are there seconds in the creation date, which can be taken into account?

A simple command line with ImageMagick convert works for me.

I tested with the following command line (in a directory with 14 png files), and there will be one picture per page in the pdf file.

convert  *.png out-parrot.pdf

But there can be problems with some versions of convert

It works as intended with the version of convert in Parrot 4.4

$convert --version

Version: ImageMagick 6.9.10-23 Q16 x86_64 20190101 https://imagemagick.org

but it does not work with the version of convert in Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (up to date in February 2019)

$ convert --version

Version: ImageMagick 6.9.7-4 Q16 x86_64 20170114 http://www.imagemagick.org

This version is 'not authorized' to write pdf files

$ convert  *.png out-ubuntu.pdf

convert-im6.q16: not authorized `out-ubuntu.pdf' @ error/constitute.c/WriteImage/1037.

$ apt-cache policy imagemagick

imagemagick:

  Installed: 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-16ubuntu6.4

  Candidate: 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-16ubuntu6.4

  Version table:

 *** 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-16ubuntu6.4 500

        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages

        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security/main amd64 Packages

        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

     8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-16ubuntu6 500

        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

Via an Ubuntu mailing list I had the following answer (that converting to pdf was turned off because of problems with ImageMagick vulnerabilities)

Is this a bug in ImageMagick convert, specifically for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS,
or is converting to pdf turned off by intention?

The change was intentional. See https://usn.ubuntu.com/3785-1/

Thanks, Jeremy Bicha

It depends on the filesystem. For example, on my host, I am using the fourth extended filesystem (ext4), and stat reports thusly for files:

$ touch foo; stat foo; rm foo

  File: 'foo'

  Size: 0           Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file

Device: fc00h/64512d    Inode: 262155      Links: 1

Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  Uid: ( 1000/   ownerusername)   Gid: ( 1000/   ownerusername)

Access: 2017-06-21 14:28:16.150323827 -0700

Modify: 2017-06-21 14:28:16.150323827 -0700

Change: 2017-06-21 14:28:16.150323827 -0700

 Birth: -

So you can use the last-modified time as create time is something of a misnomer.

find /path/to/images -type f -print0 -name *.jpg | xargs -0 stat -c "%y|%n" | sort | awk -F'|' '{print $2}'

This somewhat cumbersome construct will give you a list of files in order by last modification time (provided you have no files with | in their names).

Once you have and have reviewed this list, you can use Imagemagick's convert tool to assemble the PDF:

convert <<list of files>> outputfile.pdf 

Or, to do it all at once:

convert $(find /path/to/images -type f -print0 -name *.jpg | xargs -0 stat -c "%y|%n" | sort | awk -F'|' '{print $2}') outputfile.pdf

Install ImageMagick. Assuming the JPG images are in ~/images and the file names don't contain any spaces (nor any of [*?) and you have a directory ~/combined:

convert -combine -append $(ls -tr ~/images/*.jpg) ~/combined/all.jpg

or

  convert -combine -append $(ls -tr ~/images/*.jpg) ~/combined/all.pdf

If the images are not the same size, you will get warnings. -append combines images top to bottom. Change to +append and images will combine left to right.

Time: Although ls -l shows time down to hour:minute, Linux keeps track of the access, modify, and age/change times down to the nano second I believe. So sorting by ls -tr does account for even fractions of seconds.