Your photos go in untouched
Most converters open each photo, redraw it and save it again as a new JPG. Every time a JPG is saved it loses a little detail, so the PDF ends up softer than the photos you started with.
We don’t do that. A JPG is placed into the PDF byte for byte, exactly as your camera or phone saved it. Zoom into the PDF and you’ll see the same pixels as in the photo.
The right way up
Phones often store a photo sideways and add a small tag saying which way is up. Photo apps read the tag, which is why the picture looks fine in your gallery. Plenty of converters ignore it, and that’s where sideways pages come from.
We read the tag and turn each page to match, without redrawing the photo. The one exception is a mirrored photo (the selfie-camera kind), which has to be redrawn once to flip it back.
Page size and margins
- A4 is the default and suits most forms and printing outside North America.
- Letter is the US and Canada paper size.
- Same as image makes each page exactly the shape of its photo, with no white border. Good for sharing on screen.
The margin can be None, Small (the default) or Large. Small leaves a thin white border like a printed page. Choose None when you want the photo to fill the page edge to edge.
Photographing documents to turn into a PDF
If the photos are of paper, a few habits make a big difference:
- lay the page flat on a dark surface, so its edges stand out;
- use daylight from a window rather than the flash, which leaves a bright patch;
- hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle;
- fill the frame with the page, so there’s no desk around it.
Crop each photo in your phone’s Photos app before adding it here. We place what you give us and don’t crop or straighten yet.
Order, and what you get
Drop all the photos at once. Each one is numbered, and you drag the tiles into order, or use the arrow keys. “Add more” picks up photos you forgot. One photo makes a PDF with the photo’s own name. Several make one PDF named after the first, like IMG_2041-and-more.pdf. A wide photo gets a landscape page, so it isn’t shrunk to fit.
The PDF is as big as the photos
Since nothing is re-compressed, ten phone photos of 3 MB each make a PDF of about 30 MB. That’s ideal for keeping, but too big for most upload forms. Run it through Compress PDF next, or straight to a limit like 200 KB. To add pages to a PDF you already have, make this one, then merge the two.
Checked against the tool on 22 October 2026. How we write and test these guides