Sending a camera roll as one PDF
The photos are already on your phone: a few pages snapped for a form, receipts for an expense claim, pictures from a trip someone asked for as one file. Getting them into a PDF is the easy part. Whether your browser can open the iPhone's own format, whether a photo of paper is good enough as it was taken, and how big the result will be are the things that decide whether the PDF is worth sending.
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Which tool you need
Pictures from a camera roll, one to a page
This page. Choose them in any mix of formats, put them in order, and each becomes its own page.
Photos of paper that came out tilted or skewed
Scan to PDF. Drag the four corners onto the corners of the sheet and it flattens the page, in color, grayscale or black and white. It reads JPEG, PNG and WebP, not HEIC.
HEIC photos on a Windows, Android or Linux computer
Convert them to JPG first, or open this page on the iPhone itself. Setting the iPhone camera to Most Compatible saves new photos as JPG from then on.
A finished PDF too heavy to email
Compress PDF on the result. It re-saves the photos inside at a lower quality, and photos are where nearly all of such a file's weight is.
Photos that belong with a PDF you already have
Make the photo PDF here, then put the two files together in Merge PDF, in whichever order they should read.
Where the iPhone's HEIC photos open
HEIC is opened by your browser's own decoder, not by this site, so it works only where the browser can read it: Safari on a Mac, and every browser on an iPhone or iPad running iOS 17 or later. Chrome, Edge and Firefox on a computer or an Android phone are not on that list, and a photo the browser cannot open is turned away when you add it rather than becoming a blank page.
JPG photos have no such limit, which is why the quickest fix on another device is a JPG copy of each photo, or simply making the PDF on the phone that took them.
What travels with your photos, and how heavy it gets
The location, the time and the phone model a camera tucks inside each photo stay behind, so a PDF of holiday pictures or a photographed ID does not tell its recipient where you were standing. What you see in the picture is all the PDF holds.
A JPG goes in exactly as it was saved, so its quality is untouched and so is its weight. Every other format, HEIC included, is stored without loss, which can make the PDF larger than the photos were, so a long batch of phone photos makes a heavy file until it is compressed.
What to know before you start
- Words in a photographed page are part of the picture and cannot be searched or copied.
- Photos go in as taken: nothing here straightens, crops or cleans up a page.
- HEIC needs Safari on a Mac, or iOS 17 or later on an iPhone or iPad.
- A batch bigger than this device can safely hold is turned away when you choose it.
- Nothing is uploaded; on a phone the PDF can go straight to Share.