Guide
How to Combine Photos into One PDF (Without Uploading Them)
To combine photos into one PDF, open the Images to PDF tool in your browser, drop the photos, put them in order, and download a single PDF. Nothing is uploaded — the PDF is assembled on your own device, so scans of IDs and contracts stay private. Free, no sign-up, no watermark.
Almost every organisation that asks for documents asks for one PDF. Photos of receipts, a passport, signed pages, meter readings — and they want it as a single file, in order.
Do it in your browser
- Open Images to PDF.
- Add your images — JPG, PNG or WebP.
- Reorder them with the arrows until the sequence is right.
- Create the PDF and download it.
The images are assembled into a PDF inside the tab. Nothing is uploaded, which matters given that this is exactly the job people do with passports, bank statements and signed contracts.
Get the order right before you start
The tool lets you reorder, but you can save yourself the work.
Phone galleries sort by capture time, and file managers sort alphabetically — which means photo10.jpg sorts before photo2.jpg. If you are selecting many files at once, rename them with padded numbers first: 01, 02, … 10. Then the order is right when they arrive.
Photograph documents so they look like scans
The PDF is only as good as the photos, and phone photos of paper have predictable problems.
- Light from the side, not behind you. Standing between the window and the page puts your shadow on it.
- Shoot straight down. An angled photo gives you a trapezoid, and no amount of PDF work squares it up.
- Fill the frame. Cropping later throws away resolution you could have had.
- Avoid flash on glossy paper. It blows out a patch of the text.
Both iOS and Android have a built-in document scanner (in Notes and Google Drive respectively) that deskews and boosts contrast. If the document matters, use it and export the images.
Keep the file small enough to email
A dozen full-resolution phone photos makes a PDF of 30 MB or more, over most email limits.
Resize the images to around 1600 px on the long edge before combining — text stays perfectly readable and the PDF ends up a fraction of the size. Use the image resizer first, then combine.
If the PDF is already made and too big, run it through the PDF compressor.
Strip the metadata
Phone photos carry GPS coordinates and timestamps, and those travel into the PDF with them. Before sending a document to a stranger, run the images through Remove image metadata, or clean the finished file with Remove PDF metadata.
Going the other way
Need the images back out of a PDF someone sent you? PDF to Images renders each page to a PNG or JPG.
Related
- Images to PDF
- Merge PDF — join PDFs you already have
- Compress PDF