Why one PDF instead of separate photos?
A single PDF keeps the pages in the order you meant, opens the same on every computer and phone, prints on real paper sizes, and arrives as one attachment rather than a dozen that land out of order. It is what an insurer wants for a set of receipts, a school for a signed form, or a client for a stack of whiteboard photos.
How do you make the PDF?
- Open Image to PDF and drop in the photos. JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and most other image formats are accepted. Image to PDF
- Drag the thumbnails into order, or move one with its arrow buttons. The PDF follows this order, one page per photo.
- Pick the page size. US Letter is selected to start; Legal, A4, A3, A5, Square and Fit to image are in the same list, and Fit to image makes each page the shape of its own photo.
- Set the margin, 10 mm to start, and choose Contain to keep each whole photo on its page, or Cover to fill the page and crop the overflow.
- Save the PDF. It is built in your browser and downloads as one file.
Orientation follows each photo unless you choose otherwise: on Auto, a wide photo gets a landscape page and a tall one a portrait page.
Which page size should you choose?
US Letter if the PDF will be printed in the United States, because that is the paper American printers are loaded with, and A4 if it is going almost anywhere else, where the ISO 216 paper sizes are the standard. Legal is the longer US sheet that some legal and government forms still use.
Fit to image suits a PDF that will only ever be read on a screen. Each page takes the shape of its own photo, plus the margin, so a wide photo is not shrunk onto a tall page with white bands above and below it, and a reader on a phone can zoom in without scrolling past empty paper.
How do you keep the PDF small enough to send?
A PDF is roughly as large as the images you put in it. JPEG photos usually go in without being recompressed, so twelve photos straight from a phone make a PDF about as heavy as those twelve files together. If it has to go by email, shrink the photos first.
- Resize the photos to 2000 pixels on the long side, which still prints a full Letter page at about 180 DPI. Resize image
- Make the PDF from the resized copies. Image to PDF
Already made the PDF? Compress PDF shrinks the photos inside it and keeps everything else, and its largest image side of 2000 pixels, the setting it starts on, does the same job after the fact.
Photos in other formats are converted on the way in: a PNG is packed losslessly, and a WebP or HEIC photo is stored as PNG, which makes a heavier page than a JPEG would. Converting those to JPEG first, with the HEIC to JPG converter for example, keeps the PDF lighter.
What if you already have several PDFs?
Merge them instead of rebuilding from images. Merge PDF copies the pages across without re-rendering them, so text stays selectable and nothing loses quality. To reorder, rotate or delete single pages afterward, use Organize PDF pages.
Worth knowingPhotographing documents rather than scanning them? Straighten each photo first with Straighten a document photo, and the pages come out rectangular instead of tilted.