How to Turn Photos or Scans Into One PDF
Photographing a document with your phone is the fastest scanner most people own. The result, though, is a pile of JPGs — and the form wants one PDF. Here's how to get from one to the other cleanly.
Take better photos first
- Shoot from directly above, with the page filling the frame.
- Use daylight or a bright lamp and avoid your own shadow.
- Put the page on a dark, plain surface so the edges are clear.
Convert in your browser
- Open Images to PDF and drop the photos (JPG, PNG or WebP).
- Arrange them in order with the arrows.
- Choose the page size: A4 or Letter for documents that might be printed, or Same as image to keep each photo's own size.
- Pick a margin and an image quality, then create the PDF.
Landscape photos automatically get a landscape page.
Keeping the file small
Phone photos are large, so a 10-page PDF can easily reach 30 MB. Set image quality to 60–75% — the text stays perfectly readable and the file shrinks dramatically. If it's still too big, run the finished PDF through Compress PDF with grayscale on.
iPhone photos
Photos in .HEIC format need converting to JPG first with HEIC to JPG; then add them here.
What this doesn't do
The PDF contains pictures of the pages, so the text isn't searchable or selectable. If you need the words themselves, run the photos through the OCR tool to extract the text.