How to turn images into a PDF
Photos, screenshots and scans all become a single document the same way — but the choices you make about size and order decide whether the result looks deliberate or thrown together.
Skip to the toolPNG to PDFSomebody wants one document and you have eleven photographs. It is the most ordinary task in the world and it still goes wrong in the same three ways every time: the order is scrambled, the pages are different sizes, and the file is enormous.
Order is decided before you start
Most tools take images in the order they are given, and most file pickers give them in alphabetical order. IMG_2.jpg sorts after IMG_10.jpg, which is how a set of photos arrives shuffled.
The fix is to check the order in the tool before converting rather than after. Rearranging pages afterwards is possible but it is work you did not need to do.
Screenshots and graphics
Page size, and why the pages do not match
Photographs from a phone are one shape, screenshots another, scans a third. Put them straight into a PDF and each page takes the shape of its image, which is why the result flicks between portrait and landscape as you scroll.
For anything that will be printed, put every image on a consistent page size. For something only ever read on screen, matching the images is often fine and wastes less space.
Photographs
Scans deserve the scan tool
Photographs of documents are their own problem. Taken by hand they arrive slightly rotated, unevenly lit and framed with a bit of desk around the edge. Dropping those straight into a PDF gives you a document that looks like photographs of paper rather than paper.
Photos of documents
A PDF of photographs is still a set of pictures. Nothing in it is searchable text until it has been through OCR — which is what Searchable PDF is for.
Keeping the file sensible
Eleven modern phone photographs are perhaps forty megabytes, and the PDF will be about the same. That is fine to keep and too big to email. Compressing afterwards is usually the right move, and for documents rather than artwork the quality loss is invisible.
Common questions
PNG or JPG for the images going in?
Whatever you already have — converting between them first only loses quality. As a rule, PNG suits screenshots and graphics with hard edges, JPG suits photographs, and a PDF happily contains both.
Will the images lose quality?
Not from being placed into the PDF. They are embedded as they are. Quality is only lost if you compress the PDF afterwards, and that is your choice to make.
Can I add more images to a PDF later?
Yes — make a second PDF from the new images and merge the two. Merging is lossless, so nothing degrades by doing it in two steps.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. The conversion happens in your browser, which for personal photographs is rather the point.
Read next
How-to guides
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
Ctrl+F finds nothing because your document is a picture of words rather than words. OCR fixes that by adding an invisible text layer — without changing a single pixel of how the scan looks.
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How to scan a document properly with your phone
A photograph and a scan are the same capture done differently. Lighting, angle and framing are what separate them — and why your council rejected the last one.
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