Convert images to PDF
Photo to PDF in one pass: drop in your pictures, put them in order, and get one PDF back. Everything happens in this tab, so the images are never uploaded.
The pages appear here once you add pictures.
How to use it#
- Drop your images into the box above. Add more at any time.
- Move them into order with the arrows on each row.
- Choose a page size and a margin.
- The PDF is made as you go, so press Download PDF to save it.
Why anything becomes a PDF eventually#
A PDF is the only document format you can hand to a stranger and be confident it opens and looks the same. That is why forms ask for one. A photograph of a signed page, a receipt, a passport, a meter reading: all of them are images, and all of them get asked for as PDFs.
Combining several into one document matters as much as the format. Uploading four separate photos of a four page contract is how a submission gets rejected, and stapling them into one file in the right order is the actual job.
Choosing the page#
Fit the image makes each page exactly the size of the picture on it, so nothing is added and nothing is cropped. The pages come out different sizes if your images are, which is fine on screen and looks odd when printed.
A4 or US Letter gives every page the same size, which is what you want for anything destined for paper or for a form that expects a standard document. The picture is scaled down to fit inside the margins and centred, and a picture wider than it is tall turns the page landscape so it fills more of the sheet.
A small image is never blown up to fill the page. Enlarging a 400 pixel photo to A4 does not add detail, it only makes the blur bigger, so it is placed at its own size instead.
What the file size depends on#
Almost entirely on the images. A PDF carrying ten phone photos is about as big as ten phone photos, because they are embedded more or less as they are. JPEGs go in untouched, so nothing is re-compressed and nothing is lost.
Formats a PDF cannot hold directly, such as HEIC, WebP, GIF, AVIF, and BMP, are converted to JPEG on the way in. That is a re-encode and costs a little quality, which is unavoidable: the PDF format has no way to store them.
If the result is too big for an upload limit, shrink the images before adding them, not the PDF afterwards. The image compressor and resizer are the tools for that.
Order is the thing people get wrong#
Pages come out in the order shown on screen, not the order the files are named or the order your computer happened to hand them over. Dropping twenty files selected at once gives you whatever order the file picker used, which is often alphabetical and often not what you want when the files are IMG_0987 through IMG_1002.
The arrows on each row move a picture up or down, and the number in front of each name is the page it will become. Check that column before you download rather than after.
Frequently asked questions#
Are my images uploaded anywhere?
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No. The PDF is assembled in this tab by your own browser. Nothing is sent to a server, which matters when the images are photographs of documents, which they usually are.
Can I control the page order?
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Yes. Each row has arrows to move it up or down, and the number in front of the filename is the page it will become. The order on screen is the order in the document.
Does it reduce the quality of my photos?
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JPEG and PNG images are embedded exactly as they are, so nothing is lost. HEIC, WebP, GIF, AVIF, and BMP are converted to JPEG first, because a PDF cannot store those, and that conversion costs a small amount of quality.
Can I use photos straight from an iPhone?
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Yes. An iPhone saves photos as HEIC, and those go in like any other image: each one is decoded in this tab and written into the PDF as a JPEG. The decoder is fetched only when you drop a HEIC, and each photo then takes a couple of seconds to read. A portrait JPEG from a phone camera stays upright too, as it looks on the phone.
Why is my PDF so large?
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Because the images are. A PDF of ten phone photos is about the size of ten phone photos. Compress or resize the images before adding them if the PDF has to meet an upload limit.
Can I add more images after starting?
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Yes. Drop more in at any point and they are added to the end of the list, where you can move them into place. Any document already built is discarded, since it no longer matches what is on screen.
Will the text in my scans be searchable?
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Not straight away. A photograph of a page is a picture of words, not words, and building the PDF does not read them. To make it searchable, run the finished PDF through PDF OCR, which reads the text and lays it invisibly over each page, so search, selection, and copying work.