Sorting input files

Retrobatch
1

I’m trying to set up a workflow that will create a PDF from a bunch of individual jpeg files. The files are named like this:
00000001.jpg
00000002.jpg
00000003.jpg
00000004.jpg
00000005.jpg

When I drag these to the “read individual files” action, I can see in the Inspector that Retrobatch has read them in descending order. (0000005.jpg, 0000004,jpg, etc)

I’ve tried to figure out how to use a Sort node to correct the order, but I’m stumped. How can I get these to feed into the PDF Maker node in the correct (ascending) order?

Thanks for any help.

2

Hello, and welcome to the forum.

There’s no node that’ll change the order images are processed after they have been added to the Files node.

However, if they are in a single folder, then you can drag and drop that folder into the canvas and use the Sort By: option to change the order they are read. Does that work for you?

3

Thanks! Hmm, that helps. Is there a way to pass a folder and sort order from a script or command line? I have a lot of folders that need processing like this.

(Background: I have very old magazine scans, where each page was scanned as a separate jpeg file. I’m trying to compile each issue into one PDF, which I’ll later OCR for search ability. Retrobatch’s PDF Maker does a nice job of the assembly, but there are many issues that need processing.)

4

You can pass the arguments to Retrobatch from the shell, and it’ll keep the order you pass them in for processing. If you give a folder, it’ll sort everything in that folder before adding them.

5

Thank you, Gus. For posterity, here’s where I landed:

ls -1r | xargs /Applications/Retrobatch.app/Contents/MacOS/Retrobatch --workflow ~/Desktop/jpeg2pdf.retrobatch --output ~/Desktop/temp/

Given the filenames I provided earlier in this thread, to get the pages to come out of PDF Maker in ascending order the -r argument was needed for ls.This is executed with the current directory set to the folder containing the jpeg files to convert.