Tools for managing research images & pdfs

These scripts are tools I've developed to help manage photographs taken during research which are to be combined & OCR'd into PDF files.

Requirements

• OS X (it probably can be made to run on any Unix-based system, but the tagging system is OS X-only)
• Homebrew
• Homebrew packages: tag, imagemagick, poppler, graphicsmagick, jasper (for JPEG2000 support)
• pip2 package img2pdf

Open Terminal, and install homebrew if you don't have it yet:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Then install the packages in the background:

brew install tag imagemagick poppler

Usage & Notes

make-pdfs

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The latest version will encode the PDFs using JPEG-2000! (JP2) This will dramatically reduce the size of your PDFs.

This is a script which will take a set of photographs and concatenate them into a PDF. I used to use Adobe Acrobat to do this, but you can only make one PDF at a time, and it also blocks Acrobat while you are doing it (so you can't read or work with other files at the same time.) So I created a script to do it for me!

It's based around a system of organizing images into folders, one for each folder in the archive where I did the research, and tags, where I mark folders whose images I've correctly oriented as photos oriented, and whose images I've turned into a PDF as pdf made. For instance:

archive-images
├── archive-visit-2016-04-25
│   ├── ArchiveName-Box1-Folder1
│   │   ├── IMG_6135.JPG
│   │   └── IMG_6136.JPG
│   ├── ArchiveName-Box2-Folder3
│   │   ├── IMG_6543.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6544.JPG
│   │   └── IMG_6545.JPG
│   ├── ArchiveName-Box2-Folder4
│   │   ├── IMG_6287.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6288.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6289.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6290.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6291.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6292.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6293.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6294.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6295.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6296.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6297.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6298.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6299.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6300.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6301.JPG
│   │   ├── IMG_6302.JPG
│   │   └── IMG_6303.JPG

If I run the make-pdfs script in the archive-images/archive-visit-2016-04-25 folder, it will make one PDF file for each of the folders contained within (in this case, ArchiveName-Box1-Folder1.pdf, ArchiveName-Box2-Folder2.pdf, ArchvieName-Box2-Folder4.pdf). I will still need to OCR the files separately, and potentially compress them further using Adobe Acrobat. However, this can be done for multiple files simultaneously, so it's less of a pain.

To prepare:

0. Have a backup. Always have a backup!
1. Download the make-pdfs file, and place it somewhere; I keep it at ~/scripts/pdfs/make-pdfs`
2. Make the script executable, by running: chmod +x ~/scripts/pdfs/make-pdfs
3. Make sure that you have a folder ~/Dropbox/pdfs (this is where the script deposits finished PDF files)

To run it:

0. Have a backup. Always have a backup!
1. Organize your images into folders, e.g. one filesystem folder per archive folder - as above.
2. Rotate all your images so they are in the proper orientation. When the images are rotated, tag the containing folder photos oriented. (The script is set up to select the folders which have been oriented.)
3. Open Terminal and navigate to the containing folder
4. Run the make-pdfs script. It doesn't matter where you store the script (I store it at ~/scripts/pdfs/make-pdfs), it will run on the folders present where you are at in Terminal. You can run it either as make-pdfs /path/to/an/output/directory (where the PDFs will be saved), or alternately just make-pdfs which will by default save them in ~/Dropbox/pdfs. Once it is done with a folder full of images, it will mark the folder as pdf made.