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I have a lot of pictures from an historical archive. I need to crop them and to flatten them or to apply some perspective. Also, I'm looking for a software that allows me to work this with a great volume of images and then export them to PDF, something like the Cam Scanner app does automatically. Such apps works greath, but I'm looking for a similar software that works on my PC.

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    Are you using a supported Ubuntu release? Which? Please read Please read askubuntu.com/help/how-to-ask and askubuntu.com/help/formatting
    – waltinator
    Mar 25, 2022 at 23:02
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    Can use imagemagick to convert a great volume to pdf. It's mostly command-line but this makes it much easier to work with a great volume of files.
    – mchid
    Mar 26, 2022 at 0:01
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    This is a very similar question. Do you think you could slightly modify and apply the answers to your situation? There are a few different options listed. Personally, I find it easiest to work with commands to deal with a bunch of files. Type a couple of lines and press ENTER — but I believe the accepted answer and a few others use a GUI.
    – mchid
    Mar 26, 2022 at 0:05
  • The suggested duplicates do not allow cropping. Mar 26, 2022 at 5:05
  • I still do not see what version of Ubuntu you are using in the question.
    – David
    Apr 5, 2022 at 8:49

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ImageMagick from the default Ubuntu repositories can batch resize images quite easily. It can also correct the proportions between the width and height of a batch of images to produce a batch of images that all have identical proportions. All this can be done in ImageMagick with simple one line commands.

The biggest problem that you face is cropping the images to content to remove white space surrounding the images. Sometimes crop to content works and sometimes crop to content leaves white space remaining on one or more sides of the image. Worse than that is that crop to content produces an image that looks deceptively cropped at 100% zoom, but when you zoom in on the image you can see that one or more sides of the image haven't been cropped accurately and the image still has white borders that can make the edges of an image look raggedy. There's no better way to get an accurately cropped image than to zoom in on the image in GIMP and move the cut lines of the crop tool right at the edges of the image.

There is also a potential problem with batch importing images to PDF. Depending on how the images were made two or more identically sized images may appear to be different sizes in a PDF document unless you scale some of the images to fit. For this reason I like to use GIMP to convert .png images to single page PDFs and then concatenate all the pages into one merged PDF document with PDF Chain from the default Ubuntu repositories. If the merged PDF document looks OK then I accept it, otherwise I can scale the PDF pages which are all still open in GIMP so that they all look exactly the same size in the concatenated PDF document. It's possible to measure the relative scale of two images in a PDF document down to a resolution of one pixel using the Screen Ruler app from the default Ubuntu repositories.

All of these programs work great in Ubuntu. The only potential problem is that GIMP's performance is slower on computers that have low-end GPU specs. Conversely GIMP's performance is faster on computers that have high-end GPU specs.

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