Image to PDF

Photos and scans pile up as loose image files that are hard to send together. Image to PDF gathers your pictures into one tidy PDF — perfect for combining phone snapshots of a multi-page document, assembling a portfolio, or turning scanned receipts and ID photos into a single file you can submit or print.

A PDF keeps your images in a fixed order and prints predictably, which is far more practical than attaching a dozen separate photo files to an email.

Upload one or more images, arrange them in the sequence you want, and each is placed onto its own page in a new PDF. Common formats including JPG and PNG are supported, so photographs and scans can be mixed in one document.

The arrangement step is the one to take seriously. Phone cameras name files by timestamp, which usually matches the order you photographed the pages — but not if you went back to re-shoot page three, in which case the corrected page lands at the end. Selecting files in bulk can also sort them alphabetically, which puts image10 immediately after image1.

Check the order in the list before generating, not in the finished PDF. A twelve-page document submitted with pages out of sequence reads as carelessness and is often rejected outright by whoever receives it.

Most images going into a PDF are phone photographs of paper, and a few habits make the difference between a document that reads cleanly and one that gets sent back.

Shoot straight down rather than at an angle, which avoids the keystone distortion that makes pages look like trapezoids. Get even lighting and avoid casting your own shadow across the page — sitting beside a window rather than under a ceiling light usually solves this. Fill the frame with the page so you are not storing large margins of desk.

If the document will need to be searched or run through OCR later, these choices matter considerably more, because recognition accuracy depends almost entirely on image quality. A dedicated scanning app that flattens perspective and boosts contrast produces markedly better results than the plain camera app.

Modern phone photographs are large. Twelve of them assembled into a PDF can easily exceed twenty megabytes, which will bounce off most email limits and many upload forms — and the recipient gains nothing from full camera resolution on a photograph of a page of text.

If the result is too large, compressing it afterwards is effective, because image-heavy PDFs are exactly what compression handles best. Reducing the images before assembly works too, and gives you more control over the outcome.

For pure text documents, consider whether the pages need to be in colour at all. Greyscale roughly thirds the data with no loss of legibility for black text on white paper.

Images are converted locally in your browser and are never uploaded or stored. This is the relevant guarantee for the common uses of this tool, which skew personal: passport and ID photographs, medical letters, receipts, signed forms and proof-of-address documents.

Once assembled, remember that the PDF inherits whatever the images carried. Photographs from a phone often include location metadata recording where the picture was taken, which is not something most people intend to attach to a document.