How to Turn Photos and Scans Into One PDF (A4, Letter and File Size)

Forms, applications and email attachments often ask for one PDF, while what you have is a folder of photos: a passport copy, pages of a contract, receipts. Combining them is straightforward, but three choices decide whether the result looks professional and stays small enough to send: page size, margins and image quality.

The basic steps

1. Open JPG to PDF and add your images. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF are accepted.
2. Put them in order by moving or removing thumbnails. Each image becomes one page.
3. Choose the page size, orientation, margin and quality.
4. Create the PDF and download it.

Phone photos that are stored sideways come out the right way up, because the tool respects the orientation the camera recorded. Animated GIFs use only their first frame. Nothing is uploaded; it all happens in your browser.

Page size

You can set the page to match each image, or use A4 or US Letter.

• A4 is 595.28 × 841.89 points, which is 210 × 297 mm. It is the standard in most of the world.
• US Letter is 612 × 792 points, which is 8.5 × 11 inches. Use it for US and Canadian submissions.
• Same as image gives every page the shape of its picture. It is the most faithful, but pages can differ in size, which looks untidy in some viewers.

Choose A4 or Letter for documents that will be printed or filed, and the image is fitted onto the page.

Margins and orientation

Margins can be none, small (18 points, a quarter of an inch) or large (36 points, half an inch). No margin fills the page edge to edge, which suits scans of full documents. A margin leaves white space and looks tidier for photos. Orientation can follow each image or be set to portrait or landscape for the whole file.

File size: the setting that matters most

Photos from a modern phone are several megabytes each, so a ten-photo PDF can easily reach 30 MB. The quality setting controls how much each image is reduced before it goes in:

For perspective, an A4 page at 150 dpi is 1,241 × 1,754 pixels. A picture 3,000 pixels on its longest side already has more detail than a printed page can use at that dpi, which is why Balanced is a good default. Choose Small when a form states a limit.

Tips for better results

• Light and flat. Photograph documents on a plain surface in even light, straight on, not at an angle. Shadows and tilt are the main reasons scans look amateur.
• Crop first. Remove the table around the page with the Image Cropper.
• One topic per file. Keep a passport, a contract and an invoice as separate PDFs unless the form asks for a single one.
• Check the order of the pages before you create the file, since you cannot reorder text pages afterwards without another tool such as PDF Reorder.

What the PDF contains

The pages are pictures, so the text in them cannot be searched or copied. If you need the text, run the images through OCR with OCR Image to Text first, or keep the original documents. For a large set of full-resolution photos, memory on your device can run out, so use Balanced or Small, or build the PDF in two batches and join them with Merge PDF.