Create a thumbnail from the first page of a PDF file

2 
 $ convert -thumbnail x80 file.pdf[0] thumb.png

Feb. 6, 2013, 9:44 p.m. — Janos

Explanation

  • convert is part of ImageMagick image manipulation tool
  • -thumbnail x80 means create a thumbnail image of height 80 pixels, the width will be automatically chosen to make the image proportional
  • The [0] is to create a thumbnail for the first page only, without that a thumbnail image would be created for each page in the pdf file

To do this for all PDF files in a directory tree:

find /path/to/dir -name '*.pdf' -exec convert -thumbnail x80 {}[0] {}-thumb.png \;

Limitations

Requires the ImageMagick image manipulation tool.