Photo to PDF, one per page, or a whole sheet.

A photo to PDF converter turns pictures you took into a PDF you can email, print or send to an office. Phone photos, camera files and scans go in as they are, upright, in the order you set. A single photo can fill a page, or two, four, six or nine can share a page like a small contact sheet or a family album page. The PDF is made in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

How to convert a photo to PDF

1. Drop your photos on Drop your photos here, or click to choose. HEIC photos from an iPhone are accepted.
2. Drag the cards into order. The number on each card is its page, or its place on a page.
3. Under Pages, set Pictures per page. Keep One for a full-page photo.
4. Choose Fit. Fill the space, crop the edges makes a photo cover the page, and Whole picture, white edges keeps all of it.
5. Open PDF file and set Picture quality to Smaller if the PDF is going by email.
6. Press Make the PDF and download it.

Worked example: four photos on one page

Four phone photos in the common 4:3 shape (width 4, height 3) go on one A4 sheet. The Page size menu lists A4 as 210 x 297 mm, so on its side it is 297 by 210 mm, and four cells in two rows of two are each 148.5 by 105 mm before the gap between them. A 4:3 photo is limited by the height: 105 mm tall means 105 times 4 divided by 3, which is 140 mm wide. Each photo then covers 140 x 105 = 14,700 square millimetres. On a portrait page the cells are 105 by 148.5 mm, the width limits the photo, and it is 105 mm wide and 78.75 mm tall: 8,268 square millimetres. So the landscape page shows each photo about 1.8 times as large. Match each picture chooses the way round for you.

Phone photos, upright

Phones often save a photo with a small note that says which way is up, instead of turning the pixels. The page reads that note, so your photos come out the right way. If one is still wrong, use its turn button before you make the PDF.

Photos of documents

A photo of a page of text, a form or a receipt makes a poor PDF if the table around it shows. Crop it first, or straighten it with the document scanner. For text pages, Black and white under Colour makes the file smaller and the writing easier to read. Put the pages in order before you press Make the PDF.

Keeping the file small enough to send

Twenty full-size phone photos make a big PDF, because each photo has millions of pixels and a page rarely needs that many. A page printed on A4 at 150 pixels per inch needs about 1,240 by 1,754 pixels, from 8.27 x 11.69 inches times 150. Smaller keeps the long side at 2,000 pixels, which is more than that. Smallest uses 1,200, which is lower again and suits screens. The size of the finished PDF is shown, so you can adjust and make it again.

Ideas for the layout

• A family page. Set Pictures per page to six and Fit to Fill the space, crop the edges for an even grid of photos with no white gaps in the cells.
• Front and back of a card. Two per page puts both sides on one sheet. Keep Whole picture, white edges, so no corner of the card is cut off.
• Receipts. Four per page with Black and white under Colour keeps a month of receipts on one or two pages.
• A screenshot. Copy it and press Command-V on the page. It is added as a card.

Ordering many photos

Photos from a phone or camera usually have numbered names. Sort A to Z puts them in order by name, with numbers in sequence, so photo 2 comes before photo 10. Then drag the few that need to move.

Before you send it

Open the PDF and page through it once. Check that the first page is the one you want people to see, that nothing is sideways and that any text in a photo of a document can be read. If a page is wrong, go back to the cards, fix it, and press Make the PDF again. Nothing is lost by making it a second time, and your photos stay on your computer the whole time.

Common problems

• The photo has white bars. The photo and the page have different shapes. Choose Fill the space to cover the page, or Same as each picture as the page size.
• An iPhone photo will not show. Wait a moment: HEIC files are opened first. If it still fails, convert it with HEIC to JPG.
• The pages are in the wrong order. Drag the cards, or use Sort A to Z if the photo names carry numbers.

If your pictures are a mix of types, or include TIFF scans, use image to PDF. To shrink a finished PDF, try compress PDF.