How to combine photos and images into one PDF

The basic process

With the images to PDF tool you drag the photos in, put them in the order you want with the up and down arrows, choose a page size and margin, and download a PDF with one page per image. Everything happens in your browser: the photos are not uploaded to any server, which matters when they are an ID card, a payslip or a medical report.

The limits worth knowing: each image can be up to 40 MB, and the usual formats are accepted (JPG, PNG, WebP…). If your photos come from an iPhone and are in HEIC, which not every browser can open, convert them to JPG first.

Which page size to choose

This is the decision people overlook most. The tool offers three options:

• A4. Every page is 210 × 297 mm. It is the right choice for most of the world outside North America, and for any PDF someone might print. Each photo is centred and scaled to fit inside the margin; a landscape photo produces a landscape page and a portrait one a portrait page.
• US Letter. 8.5 × 11 inches, the standard in the United States and Canada. Choose it if the recipient works in that size.
• Fit each image's own size. Each page is exactly as big as its photo, with no borders. It looks fine on screen, but there is a catch: the page is sized in points (1 point is 1/72 of an inch) at one point per pixel of the photo. A 4,000 × 3,000 pixel photo produces a page of 141 × 106 cm. On screen it looks the same, but if someone prints it, it has to be scaled down, and if your photos have different dimensions, every page comes out a different size.

Unless you know it will only be viewed on screen, use A4 or Letter, whichever your recipient expects.

A small photo is not enlarged to fill the page: if the image has fewer pixels than the page, it is placed at its real size and surrounded by white. To avoid that, use good-resolution images or the fit-to-image option.

Margin: how much to leave

There are three margins: none, small (14 points, about 5 mm) and normal (36 points, about 12.7 mm). For documents that will be read on screen or archived, “small” is a good choice. “None” makes the image run to the edge of the page; it only suits a photo already cropped to the paper, like a well-framed scan. “Normal” works better if someone is going to print it, because printers usually cannot reach the edge of the sheet.

The order of the pages

The PDF follows the order of the list, and it is easy to go wrong with phone photos, which are sorted by date rather than by your logic. Two tips: put a number in front of the file names (01, 02, 03) before adding them, and check the list before creating the PDF, because the tool itself cannot reorder pages once it is generated. If you have already created the file and a page is in the wrong place, change the order of the PDF's pages instead of starting again.

Why the PDF is so large, and how to shrink it

Today's phone photos are around 12 megapixels (4,000 × 3,000 pixels) and weigh several megabytes. The tool keeps each image's original resolution and stores it in the PDF at a high JPEG quality, so the result weighs roughly what the photos add up to. Five 4 MB photos give a PDF of the order of 20 MB, which no longer fits many forms or an email.

There are three ways to bring it down, from most to least recommended:

1. Shrink the photos first. A 12-megapixel photo is overkill for a document read on screen. With the image resizer or the image compressor you cut each photo's size without the text becoming unreadable. A text document needs far less resolution than a landscape photograph.
2. Compress the PDF afterwards with the PDF compressor.
3. Aim for a specific limit (say, “under 5 MB”) with the tool that reduces a PDF to an exact size.

If the PDF is too big for email, see the guide on what to do with a PDF that is too large to send, with the real limits of Gmail and Outlook.

Getting a result that reads well

The PDF will only be as good as the photos. A few things that make a difference when photographing documents:

• Even light, with no shadow from your hand or the phone. Natural light by a window usually works better than flash.
• The phone parallel to the paper, so the page does not come out as a trapezoid. If it still comes out crooked, you can straighten the scanned document before converting.
• The document filling most of the frame, on a plain, dark surface, so the edges show.

What this PDF does not do

The result is a PDF of images: each page is a photo. The text in it cannot be selected, searched or copied, just as with any scan. If you need the text, run it through OCR; the steps are in the guide on how to convert a scanned PDF to text.