When you need to distribute a particular set of images – or perhaps reconstruct some scanned pages into a digital version of the original document – then being able to combine those JPGs into a single PDF can be very useful. There are commercial tools which will handle this for you, but if your needs are simple then there’s no need to spend big money; the free (for personal use) JPGasPDF could provide everything you need.
The program is compact (a single 572KB executable), with a basic straightforward interface. If you’re in a hurry you could just click the Add button to select your images, the Create button to save the finished PDF, and, well, that’s it -- your document will be saved right away.
JPGasPDF does have one or two tiny extras, though, which help to make the program more interesting. So if your imported images are in the wrong order, for instance, that’s no problem – you can drag and drop to rearrange them.
Better still, you can save image lists and reload them later. This means that you could create a basic document template -- a collection of images which you’d like to open and close your PDF, say -- and then add other JPGs somewhere in between.
And the program even previews each image as you click on it. The preview pane is ridiculously small, unfortunately -- around 80×60 pixels -- and so almost entirely useless for text-based pages, but if your images have distinct graphics then there’s a faint chance you might recognize something.
JPGasPDF has some room for improvement. We’d like to see it able to import images via drag and drop, for instance – right now you can only do this via the Add button.
And the program really needs a better way to let you view the contents of an individual image, even if it’s only double-clicking the file to open it in the default JPG handler (this seems the simplest option, as currently there’s no double-click action at all).
Otherwise, though, JPGasPDF does its work very well, and is also compact, easy to use, with no adware or other marketing hassles at all. If you don’t currently have anything similar then we’d grab a copy immediately.
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