JPG to PDF

How to turn photos into a PDF

This is the tool for the most common paperwork job there is: somebody asks for a document as a PDF, and what you have is four photographs of it taken with your phone. Sending four photos instead is what gets an application refused.

1. Drop the photos on the box at the top. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP all work.
2. Check the order and drag a photo, or use its arrows, if one is in the wrong place.
3. Choose the page size. Same shape as the photo gives each page the shape of the picture on it, so nothing is ever cut or bordered.
4. A4 or Letter puts every photo on a real page of that size, centred, with the margin you pick. Use this when the file will be printed.
5. Press Make the PDF.

Which page size to choose

Same shape as the photo is right for anything that will be read on a screen. Each page is exactly as wide and as tall as its photo, which means no white bands at the sides and no cropping. A document made of five phone photos comes out as five pages of slightly different sizes, which looks perfectly normal on screen.

A4 or Letter is right for anything that will be printed, or anything going to an office that expects standard paper. Every photo is made as large as it can be on the page while keeping its shape, and centred, so a sideways photo sits across the middle with white above and below it rather than being cut to fit.

The margin only applies to A4 and Letter. A small margin gives the largest picture; a normal margin is what a printer can actually reach, because most printers cannot print right to the edge of the paper.

Keeping the file small enough to email

A PDF made of photographs is as big as the photographs in it, and a modern phone takes photos of four or five megabytes each. Four of those make a twenty megabyte PDF, which several mail services will refuse.

The photos are put in as JPGs at the quality they arrived with rather than being re-compressed, so nothing is degraded here. If the result is too big, make the photos smaller first and then come back - a scan of a sheet of A4 is perfectly readable at around 1600 pixels across, which is a fraction of what a phone camera produces.