Automatic visual numbering of series of pictures?

I need to present a substantial series of pictures to an audience that ought to be able to identify the images by an individual number stamped onto the image.

I can of course do that in a time consuming manner by editing the image files individually to include a text box with a sequential number on each of them, but preferably not.

Does anybody her know of a program that can edit in an incremental number on a series of jpegs?

Imagemagick in a shell script should do it.

convert -annotate +startx+starty "annotation" SrcImage.ext DstImage.ext is the basic syntax. More here: ImageMagick text display – Geo Imagine Developer

I think you can use variables in the watermark module…