How To Convert JPEG Image Files To a PDF On Mac

If you want to convert a group of JPG image files to a single PDF, you can use a variety of methods. Most people will tell you to use Preview. But there are other ways that are either simpler or more versatile. You can use a Quick Action to do it without even opening up an app. You can also use Pages and Keynote to create richer PDFs with border, text and other features. The best way may be to use Photos which offers a variety of printing options that can be used to create PDFs.
Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to convert a bunch of image files to a PDF.
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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.
How To Convert JPEG Image Files To a PDF On Mac

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