Turning photos into a PDF worth sending
Putting pictures into a PDF is a way of making one thing out of many, and the file that comes out is only as useful as the pictures that went in. Two things are worth knowing first: the photos keep their quality and lose their camera details, and a photographed page of writing is a picture of writing. This page covers both, and the page-size choice that decides whether the result looks like a document or like a phone gallery.
Which tool you need
Photos or camera scans that need to be one file
JPG to PDF. Every picture appears in one preview in the order it will be written, and any of them can be dragged, turned or taken out before you download.
Screenshots, logos or anything with a transparent background
PNG to PDF. Those are usually saved as PNG, and a PNG keeps its transparency and its sharp edges where a JPG would soften them.
Photos taken on an iPhone that are not JPGs
A HEIC picture needs turning into a JPG first, which the Photos app does when you export or share it. This tool takes JPG files.
The PDF needs to join other PDFs
Make the picture PDF here, then Merge PDF to put it with the rest. Merging takes PDFs, so pictures have to become a document first.
The finished PDF is far too big to email
Compress PDF on the result. Photos go in at full quality, so twenty phone pictures make a file of twenty phone pictures, and compressing is where you trade some of that back.
A photographed page is not text
A PDF made from pictures holds pictures. Words in a photographed page cannot be searched, selected or copied, and nothing here reads them out of the picture for you.
That is fine for a record of a receipt and wrong for a document somebody has to work with. If the words matter, ask for the original file rather than a photograph of it — a PDF made from a real document keeps its text, and no conversion can put text back that was never there.
What is taken out on the way in
The date, the device, the location and any notes a camera or an app stored inside the JPG are removed before the picture is written into the PDF, along with anything a phone keeps behind the picture such as a motion photo's clip. The result tells you how many pictures were carrying them.
The picture itself is untouched: nothing is re-compressed, and an embedded color profile is kept so colors keep their meaning. The one exception is a photograph the camera recorded as mirrored, which is put the right way round and saved again at high quality — and the result says when that happened.
Which page size to choose
By default each page is the same shape as its picture, with no borders. That is the right answer for photographs, where any other paper size means bars down two sides of every page.
Choose A4 or US Letter when the result is going to be printed or filed with other documents, and say whether each picture should fit inside the page or fill it, with or without a margin. Filling the page crops what does not fit, so fitting is the safer choice for a photographed document.
What to know before you start
- JPG files only. PNG pictures have their own tool, and other formats need converting first.
- Nothing reads text out of a picture, here or in any tool on this site.
- Nothing is uploaded. The PDF is put together in your browser and saved to this device, and the pictures never go anywhere.