Image to PDF

Turn a stack of phone photos of documents into one PDF

Schools, offices and agencies often want one PDF rather than a handful of loose photos. This tool takes JPG and PNG images in the order you set, puts one image on each page, and saves a single PDF. The conversion runs inside your browser and the photos are never uploaded.

A closer look

A JPG is placed into the PDF as it is, without being compressed again. That means no loss of quality, and the finished file is usually about the combined size of the photos. A PNG is stored losslessly, so quality is the same too, but photos saved as PNG can make a surprisingly large PDF. Each page takes the exact pixel dimensions of its image, so nothing is cropped and no margins are added; the flip side is that images with different resolutions produce pages of different sizes. There is no option to fit everything onto a uniform A4 or Letter page.

Phone gallery apps read an orientation tag and show a photo upright, but this tool places the pixels in the direction they were stored. Some photos can therefore appear sideways in the PDF; if that happens, straighten those pages with Rotate PDF. And because JPGs go in untouched, the camera data inside them, such as capture time, phone model and, if it was recorded, the location, is carried inside the PDF’s image data as well. For sensitive paperwork, run the original photos through the Document Leak Checker first to see whether they contain a location.

How to use it

• Press Choose files or drag images onto the drop area. You can pick many at once, and anything you add later is appended to the end of the list.
• The numbers in the list are the page order. Move images with ↑ and ↓, and remove a blurry shot with ✕. Each row shows the file size, so an unusually heavy photo stands out.
• Press Convert to PDF. The status line shows progress such as “Processing… (3/8)” with the file name.
• When you see “Done! Converted N image(s) into a PDF”, a file named “images.pdf” downloads. Rename it to whatever the recipient expects before sending.

When it helps

Common snags

Tip Without a scanner app, lay the document on a dark surface and shoot straight down from above. The edges stay crisp and square, and the pages are much easier to read once they are in a PDF.