How to turn phone photos of documents into one PDF

Photographing a document is quick. Sending someone fourteen separate images is not. Here is how to turn them into a single PDF that opens and prints like a real document.

Photos to PDF
Whichever tool you use here, the file stays on your device. How that works

Step by step

  1. 1Open the image to PDF tool and add your photos in the order you want them.
  2. 2Use the arrows to fix the order if your phone sorted them oddly.
  3. 3Choose A4 or Letter pages so it prints properly, and leave a small border.
  4. 4Make the PDF, check the preview of the first page, and save it.

Getting a photographed document to look like a scan

Crop out desks, hands and unrelated papers before combining photos. A contrast adjustment can improve legibility but cannot reliably remove shadows or recover blurred characters; retake unreadable pages in even light.

Images to PDF puts one photo on each page. Choose A4, Letter or fit-to-photo size, orientation and margins, then arrange photos using the arrows. The first-page preview is not a check of the whole document: save images.pdf and inspect every page.

The resulting PDF contains page images, not searchable text. Image to text can separately recognise English text and export it as TXT; it does not add an OCR text layer to this PDF.

Keeping the PDF a sensible size

JPG photos are placed into the PDF exactly as they are, without being compressed again. That keeps their quality, and it also means the PDF is about as large as the photos you put in. Ten phone photos at 4 MB each will make a PDF of roughly 40 MB.

To make it smaller, shrink the photos first with Compress image, to a width of about 1920 pixels, and then build the PDF. That is far better than compressing the finished PDF, which would turn the pages into pictures a second time and make them softer.

Questions

Can I combine photos and existing PDFs?

Make images.pdf here first, then combine it with the existing documents in Merge PDFs.

How many pages can my phone handle?

Available memory varies. Use smaller photos or smaller batches if processing fails; there is no performance guarantee.

Why is my PDF so large?

Each photo is embedded as it is, so the PDF is about the total of the photos. Make the photos smaller with Compress image before you build the PDF.

Related jobs and next steps

How to scan a document with your phonePhotograph a document and turn it into a proper PDF, without installing a scanner app or handing your paperwork to a cloud service.How to make a PDF of your photosPut a collection of images into a single PDF for a portfolio, a report or a record, on your own device.How to turn receipt photos into a PDFCombine photographed receipts into one PDF for an expense claim, without uploading your spending to anyone.

Tools that help with this job

Photos to PDF
Merge PDFCombine files into one, in any orderCrop & rotateQuarter turns, flips and ratio cropsFilters & adjustBrightness, contrast, saturation, B&WCompress PDFGet under an email or upload limit