Photos in, PDF out
Lots of forms and portals want a PDF, but what you've got is a camera roll full of photos. Took pictures of a signed form, your ID, a whiteboard, a pile of receipts? Drop them here and get one PDF with each image as its own page.
It takes JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF files (for an animated GIF, you get the first frame). Mix them however you want.
Page options that matter
Page size
- Fit to image makes each page exactly the size of its picture. No borders, no wasted space. Best for screenshots and for viewing on a screen.
- Letter (8.5 x 11 in) is the standard in the US and Canada. Pick this if anybody's going to print it there.
- A4 is the standard almost everywhere else.
Orientation
Portrait, landscape or auto. Auto turns each page to match its photo, so a wide picture gets a landscape page and a tall one gets portrait. Nothing gets cropped or stretched, either way. Images are scaled to fit and centered.
Margins
None, small or big. A small margin makes a printed copy look a lot neater and keeps the edges from getting chopped by the printer.
Tips for better photo PDFs
- Shoot flat and straight. Hold the phone directly above the paper, in good light, with no shadow from your hand.
- Crop before you convert. The edit tool built into your phone's photo app is perfect for trimming off the kitchen table.
- Check the order. Phones sometimes sort by time and sometimes by name. Give the thumbnails a quick look before converting.
- Watch the size. Modern phone photos are big, 3 to 6MB each. Ten of them make a hefty PDF. If it's too big to email, run it through Compress PDF on Medium.
iPhone photos (HEIC)
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, and not every browser can read HEIC. The good news: when you pick photos from the Photos library in Safari, iOS usually converts them to JPG for you on the way in. If a photo won't load, change Camera > Formats to "Most Compatible" in Settings, or take a screenshot of it and add that.
Scanning paper? Use a scanner app
If you're photographing paper documents, a scanning feature does a better job than the regular camera. The Notes app on iPhone and Google Drive on Android both have one built in. They straighten the page, crop out the background and boost the contrast. Some of them can save straight to PDF, which skips this step entirely.
Adding images to an existing PDF
Already have a PDF and want to tack a photo or two onto it? Skip this and use Merge PDF, which accepts images and PDFs together. Need to go the other way, PDF pages to pictures? That's PDF to JPG.
How big will my PDF be?
Roughly the size of all your images added together, plus a tiny bit. JPGs are stored as they are, without re-compressing them, so they keep their full quality. PNG and other formats get converted, which can make the PDF a bit bigger or smaller depending on the image. Ten phone photos at about 4MB each make a PDF of about 40MB. That's too big for most email and upload limits, so plan on compressing it afterward if you're sending it somewhere.
Your photos stay on your phone
The conversion happens in your browser. Photos of IDs, medical forms and receipts are exactly the kind of thing you shouldn't be uploading to random sites, and here you don't have to.