Turn Images and Screenshots into a PDF

When a PDF beats sending the images

A PDF fixes the order, the page size and the layout. That matters whenever the pictures are really a document: receipts for an expense claim, a signed form photographed page by page, a passport and visa together, a set of meter readings, a portfolio you want someone to scroll rather than shuffle. Attaching eight JPGs asks the recipient to work out the order; attaching one PDF does not.

Plenty of systems only accept PDF — government upload forms, insurance claims portals, most university submission systems and a good share of HR onboarding tools. Converting on the way in saves a bounced submission.

Page size and orientation

Each image is placed on its own page and scaled to fit while keeping its proportions, so nothing is cropped or stretched. A portrait photo lands on a portrait page and a landscape one on a landscape page. If you need every page the same way round, rotate the odd ones out before converting — the rotate and flip tool does it in two taps and costs no quality.

Keeping the file small enough to email

• Resize each photo to about 1600 pixels on the long edge first. A 12-megapixel photo carries far more detail than any page of a PDF can show.
• Convert screenshots and photos to JPG before adding them. A PDF made from PNGs of photographs is several times larger for no visible gain.
• Crop away desk, floor and background. Fewer pixels, smaller file, more readable page.
• Keep a document scan to one page per image rather than photographing two pages at once — text stays far more legible.

Photographing a document so it reads well

Flat, even light with no shadow across the page; the camera square to the paper rather than at an angle; the page filling the frame. Those three things do more for legibility than any amount of processing afterwards. If your phone has a document scanner built into its Notes or Files app, it will deskew and flatten the page for you — export that image and convert it here.

What this tool does not do

The text in the PDF is a picture of text, not selectable text. There is no OCR step, so the result is not searchable and cannot be copied from. If you need searchable text, run the scan through an OCR tool — most desktop scanner software and several phone scanner apps do this — before or instead of converting here. Equally, the PDF is not encrypted or password protected; it is an ordinary file.

As with everything on this site, the conversion happens in your browser. A photographed passport, payslip or medical letter is not uploaded anywhere, which is exactly the property you want for those documents.