To turn photos or scans into one PDF, add the pictures to an Images to PDF tool, put them in the order you want the pages, choose a page size and margin, and download the file. One picture becomes one page. The choices that matter are the page order, whether the pages are A4, US Letter or exactly the size of each picture, and how much you shrink the pictures to keep the file small. This article walks through each choice and the one privacy detail that is easy to miss.
When this is the right tool
A form that must be sent as one attachment, the front and back of an ID card, a stack of receipts for an expense report, pages of a signed contract photographed on a desk, a school assignment written by hand. In each case you have several pictures and the other side wants a single PDF. Doing it in the browser means the pictures, which often show documents and IDs, are not uploaded anywhere.
The steps
- Open the Images to PDF tab of the PDF toolkit.
- Drop the pictures on the box or choose them with the button. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP are accepted, up to 100 pictures.
- Check the order of the list. Page one is the top row. Move a row with its arrow buttons, or drag it to a new place.
- Choose the page size, orientation, margin and image quality, described below.
- Press Create PDF and download the result, which is named
images.pdf. The result line shows the number of pages, which should match the number of pictures.
Page order
The list from top to bottom is the page order, so look at it before you press the button. Phones name photos by date and time, so the order the files arrive in is not always the order of the document. Compare the names in the list with your pile of pages and move any row that is out of place. Fixing the order after the PDF exists means splitting and merging, which is much slower than moving a row.
Page size
- A4 is 210 by 297 mm, the standard in most of the world.
- US Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches, used in the US and Canada.
- Same size as the image makes each page exactly as big as its picture, with the margin added around it. Use it when your pictures are different sizes and you do not want white bands, for example receipts of different lengths. A pixel counts as 0.75 of a point, the way a web page is printed.
With A4 or Letter, each picture is scaled up or down to fit inside the margins and centred. It is never stretched out of proportion, so a picture with a different shape from the page leaves white space on two sides.
Orientation
"Automatic" turns the page to match the picture: a landscape photo gets a landscape page and a portrait one gets a portrait page, so a mixed pile looks right without any work. Choose Portrait or Landscape only when every page must be the same.
Margin
You can choose None, Small (10 mm), Medium (20 mm) or Large (30 mm), the same on every side. Use None for a full-page scan that should reach the edges, as long as you are not going to print it, since many printers cannot print right to the edge and will clip it. Use Small or Medium when the pages will be printed, and Large if they will be punched and filed.
Image quality and file size
This setting decides how big the PDF is.
| Setting | What happens to each picture | Size of the PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Original | JPG and PNG go in as they are, without recompression | About the sum of the pictures |
| Balanced | Shrunk to at most 2000 pixels on the long side, saved as JPG | Usually much smaller |
| Small file | Shrunk to at most 1200 pixels on the long side, saved as JPG | The smallest |
How sharp are those limits on paper? An A4 page is about 11.7 inches on its long side, so a picture that fills it with 2000 pixels has roughly 170 dots per inch, and with 1200 pixels roughly 100. The first is comfortable to read on screen and on paper. The second is fine for photos of documents with normal print and soft for small type, so look at one page before sending 30. A 12-megapixel phone photo, 4000 pixels wide, spread across the 11.7-inch long edge of an A4 page has about 340 dots per inch, which is more than an email needs.
For anything that will be emailed or uploaded, start with Balanced. Use Original only when you need every pixel.
A detail that is easy to miss: hidden location data
With Original quality, a JPG that needs no fixing is placed into the PDF as it is, byte for byte. That includes the hidden data inside the photo, such as the camera model and the GPS location. A PDF made this way can carry the location of every photo in it, even though nobody sees it on the page. Balanced and Small redraw each picture from its pixels, so they do not carry it across. If you need Original quality and the location matters, run the photos through the image toolkit first. The article on removing GPS location from photos shows how.
Things that go wrong
- A sideways photo. Phones record how you held them in a hidden flag that PDF viewers ignore. The tool reads the flag and turns the picture upright before placing it.
- No searchable text. The pages are pictures. The tool does not read the text in them, so you cannot select, search or copy words from the PDF. If you need that, the recipient or another program must do text recognition.
- A huge PDF. Thirty full-size photos make a PDF of tens of megabytes. Choose Balanced or Small file.
- HEIC photos. They are not supported. On an iPhone, set Settings, Camera, Formats to Most Compatible, or share the pictures as JPG.
- Dark or shadowed scans. Take the photo in even light, straight above the page, and fill the frame. A phone's built-in document scanner, where it has one, straightens and crops for you; use it first and put its pictures together here.
After the PDF exists
Open it and page through it once: right number of pages, right order, nothing cut off, every page upright. If you need only some of the pages, or want to cut the file into pieces to meet an email limit, see how to split a PDF by pages or ranges.