Hi
I have a lot of old periodicals I'd like to convert to digital formats. Late 19th early 20th century magazines mostly. I can take the images, get them into gimp, crop/white balance, and then open all the edited images as layers and safe as a gif animation. That works. Can I do something similar and end up with a jpeg?

I am assuming that the gif format is only to 'bundle' all the images into a single file, rather than an animation which will 'play' in a web-browser. If it is an animation you are stuck with gif.

A file with multiple layers, that can be viewed easily. Jpeg is a single layer format. Practically that leaves PDF format. While Gimp will export a pdf, it flattens multiple layers giving a single page. There is a script to produce multiple page PDF's but there are caveats. Have all the individual pages open as separate images.

screenshot https://i.imgur.com/DmEhpzO.jpg

The script once installed is in File -> Create -> Export Multi Page PDF.

Give it a try, if it is a file size issue, than might not be any use.

An alternative is a command line application ImageMagick which produces (only) marginally smaller PDF file size.

rich: www.gimp-forum.net

Thanks. Yes GIF is just because you can get all the images into a single file. I'll look at the PDF options but yes the file size does get to be an issue. Maybe I need to look at image to text conversion if such a thing exists.

That is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and is a whole different topic. There are free OCR applications around, do a search. Sometimes come bundled with scanner software. If you can get it to embed images in the correct place and observe formatting then you will get small files.

When it comes to Gimp and PDF all you can do is compare file size.

A quick test. For a 3 page (A4) test, black text on white background, the pdf came out slightly smaller than the 3 layer gif.