Image to PDF

From a pile of images to one clean document

Building a PDF from images is the everyday fix for the things that arrive as photos but belong as documents: a passport snapped front and back, a stack of receipts for one expense claim, a handwritten form, whiteboard shots from a meeting, or a multi-page contract someone photographed page by page. One PDF is far easier to email, file and find than a camera roll of loose JPGs — and most upload portals want a single document, not eight attachments.

Order is the thing people get wrong, because phones sort by capture time, not by the order you actually want. Arrange the tiles deliberately before you build — top-to-bottom in the list becomes page 1-to-N in the PDF. If your filenames already encode the order, rename with leading zeros (01, 02, … 10) so they don't sort 1, 10, 2.

Page size and orientation decisions

• Fit-to-image makes each page exactly the size of its photo — no borders, no whitespace. Good for a gallery feel; less good when you'll print, because page sizes vary across the document.
• Fixed A4 or Letter places every image on a standard page, which is what you want for anything that will be printed, stapled, or filed alongside other paperwork. Portrait for documents, landscape for wide whiteboard or spreadsheet shots.
• Mixed orientations are fine — a portrait contract page and a landscape diagram can sit in the same PDF, each rotated to suit its content.
• Margins matter for print: an edge-to-edge image can get clipped by a printer's non-printable border, so a small margin is the safer choice for anything destined for paper.

Compress the images first, not the PDF after

This is the single biggest size lever, and the order is counter-intuitive. Modern phone photos are 4-12 MP; eight of them embed into a PDF that can easily top 30-40 MB, which then bounces off email and portal limits. You get the most control by shrinking the photos before you build: run them through Compress Image first, then assemble. A 40 MB scan bundle routinely lands under 8 MB this way with no readability loss. (Compress PDF can also re-encode the images after the fact, but doing it up front lets you check each photo before it's baked in.)

One honest limitation: the PDF you build is image-based, so its 'text' is just pixels — not selectable or searchable. If you need to search or copy the contents (a contract, a receipt you'll reference later), run the finished file through OCR to add a real text layer underneath the images.