Alchemy is an open source, portable app that can convert and merge most image formats to PDF.

Unpacking will be slow for those who don't have a third-party compression program due to there being over 7,500 files in the zip. Windows default extractor will take a few minutes, even on a fast machine. Once extracted, click on Alchemy.exe, and you will find it running in your systray.

The interface is small, unobtrusive yet easy to read and understand. Drag and drop your images to the window. On our first try, we dragged and dropped MajorGeeks.gif, and nothing happened. We tried again with a different GIF and got the same results. So, apparently, it doesn't support most images as GIF is a pretty standard format. Our first attempt at converting a jpg to PDF resulted in getting a PNG rather than a PDF.

Otherwise, the interface remains easy to use at any skill level with easy to find merge options as well. There are only two screenshots because there's not that much else to see. It's that easy.

Overall, this falls a little short of the 4-stars we require on MajorGeeks but is one of the exceptions to that rule. It has some quirks that need to be worked out still but it can convert and merge many images to PDF, and there's not a lot of free apps that do. Other previously found bugs have already been fixed, and we feel it's close enough to present to you.