Image to PDF

Why put images into a PDF?

Photographs of documents are how most paperwork is captured now — a phone camera has replaced the flatbed scanner. But almost every organisation that receives paperwork wants a PDF, not a folder of JPGs. A single PDF keeps pages in order, arrives as one attachment, prints predictably, and cannot be accidentally separated the way a set of loose images can.

Converting images to PDF is therefore the last step of a very ordinary workflow: photograph the pages, check them, bundle them, send them. It also matters for receipts and expense claims, ID and address proofs, signed forms, handwritten notes, whiteboard photos after a meeting, and portfolios or contact sheets where a fixed page order is part of the point.

Page size, orientation and fit

The main decision is how each image maps onto a page. Fitting to A4 or Letter gives a consistent, printable document — every page is the same size, images are scaled to fit inside the margins, and portrait or landscape orientation is chosen per image so nothing is rotated unexpectedly. Matching the page to the image instead produces a PDF whose pages are exactly the photo's proportions, which suits screen viewing and image portfolios but prints inconsistently.

For anything being submitted to an office, a portal or a printer, choose a standard page size. Mixed page sizes look careless and often break automated processing on the receiving end.

Order, quality and file size

Order is the thing people get wrong most often, because phones sort by capture time and multi-page documents are frequently shot out of sequence. Arrange the images deliberately before generating the PDF and check the page order in the finished file — a bank statement with pages 3 and 4 swapped will simply be rejected.

Size follows directly from your inputs. Twelve full-resolution phone photos make a document of twenty megabytes or more, which many portals refuse. Modern phone cameras far exceed what a document scan needs: around 200 DPI is comfortably enough to read printed text, and a moderately compressed JPG at that resolution is a fraction of the original size. Compress the images before bundling, or compress the finished PDF afterwards.

• Shoot in even light with no shadow across the page.
• Hold the camera parallel to the page to avoid keystone distortion.
• Crop out the desk or background before converting.
• Use the same orientation for every page of one document.
• Name files 01, 02, 03 so the order is unambiguous.

Everything stays on your device

The PDF is assembled in your browser: images are decoded locally, drawn into pages and written into a PDF file that downloads straight from the tab. Nothing is uploaded, which matters because the images people bundle into PDFs are usually identity documents, payslips, medical letters and signed contracts — exactly the material that should never sit in a stranger's temporary upload folder.

A useful side effect is that it works offline, and there is no per-file limit or daily quota. The only ceiling is device memory when handling very large batches of very large photos.

Frequently asked questions