I had to do that just the other day - here's what I used: ls *.jpg | xargs -l -i convert -resize "50%" -gravity Center -pointsize 48 -fill "#fff" -draw 'text 0,0 "{}"' -fill "#000" -draw 'text 5,5 "{}"' {} thumbs/{} You may need to tweak the size, pointsize, color, etc. I also had to put "arial.ttf" in the path where imagemagick was looking for it. (/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/) "thumbs" is the directory I chose to output to (had to mkdir first). Using xargs helps when you're dealing with thousands of files... HTH, Chris