Organization and File Types

I work -- well, I won't say. those of you who know me, probably know. If not, call or e-mail. Anyway, where I work, we have a lot of documents to keep track of -- somewhere on the order of 2 million, for various clients. One of these clients is responsible for us having nearly a half million documents. Now, my definition of "Documents" may be different than yours. In the world I am in at work, each page that was given to us is a document, and each file or spreadsheet we create is a document.
Now, of these documents, we keep a number of them -- all of the ones given to us -- are numbered. Starting at 1 and going until we run out of documents. We have about 367,000 of these. For this client.
These documents were given to us as paper. Behind me is a wall covered in paper. Over the last 3 years (that's how long we've been gathering documents for this customer) we have been putting images of these documents into our computers. At first we were sending them out to be scanned, then we got a copy machine that can scan, and did it ourselves. But, alas, we were inconsistent.

My work computer is currently trying to convert 5061 TIF images into 5061 PDF images. And it's going VERY slowly.

See, I went ahead and got a trial copy of photoshop -- if I'm lucky, I'll never need to do this again -- so that I could convert the TIF's (and 22 JPG's) into PDF in a batch, rather than one at a time. I'm having issues doing this - every time I've tried today, I get a save-as dialog for every file.

So, if you ever have thousands of files to deal with, decide on a format BEFORE you begin. And don't waver, because it's a pain in the ass.