Do you need to turn a few photos into one PDF? Maybe a form you signed and photographed with your phone, receipts for an expense claim, or pages of a document somebody asked you to “send as a PDF”.
Don’t worry, you are not alone, and it takes about a minute. Add your pictures below, put them in order, and press the button. This JPG to PDF converter also takes PNG, WEBP and GIF, and nothing is uploaded. The PDF is made inside your own browser.
Your pictures never leave this computer. The PDF is made in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the page keeps working with the network switched off.
Add one picture or a hundred. Each one becomes a page, in the order shown, and you can move and turn them before you make the PDF.
Below I explain three things that go wrong with a lot of converters, and what this one does instead. If you only want your PDF, you already have everything you need above.
Why phone photos come out sideways in a PDF
If you have ever made a PDF from photos and found half of them lying on their side, it was not your fault.
Your phone does not actually turn the picture when you hold it upright. It saves the picture the way the camera sensor saw it, and adds a small note inside the file saying “turn me 90 degrees before you show me”. Your gallery app reads that note, so the photo looks fine on your phone.
Think of it like a sticky note on the back of a printed photo saying “this way up”. The PDF format has no idea sticky notes exist. So a converter that puts your photo into a PDF as it is, without reading that note, gives you a sideways page.
I tested this before building anything. I made a photo with that note set to “turn 90 degrees”, put it in a PDF the plain way, and opened it with MuPDF, the engine behind SumatraPDF and many other PDF readers. It came out on its side.
This tool reads the note and turns the page picture for you. All eight settings a camera can write, including the four mirrored ones, are checked the same way every time the tool changes: the PDF is opened with MuPDF and compared with what a photo app shows.
Note: if a picture still looks wrong in the list, press the turn button next to it. The turn you choose is added on top of what the camera said.
Your photo goes into the PDF exactly as it was
A JPG is already a compressed picture. Some converters open it, draw it on a canvas and save it again as a new JPG. Every time that happens, a little detail is thrown away, and there is no setting that brings it back.
A PDF can hold a JPG file just as it is, so that is what happens here. The bytes of your photo are copied into the PDF untouched. Nothing is squashed again, and the turn from the section above is done by the page, not by redrawing the picture.
That is also why the PDF comes out about the same size as your photos added together. If a converter hands you a PDF far smaller than the pictures you gave it, it has made the pictures worse to get there.
If the PDF is too big to email, shrink it afterwards with the PDF compressor, which tells you exactly what it changed. Or make the photos smaller first with the image resizer. Both work in your browser too.
The hidden details inside a phone photo
This one surprises people. Most phone photos carry a hidden block of details: the phone model, the date and time, and very often the exact GPS position where the photo was taken.
When a photo is copied into a PDF as it is, that block goes with it. Anybody who receives the PDF can pull the photo back out and read where you were standing. For a picture of your passport taken at your kitchen table, that is your home address.
So the box Remove hidden photo details is ticked when you arrive. It cuts that block out of the file and leaves the picture itself exactly as it was. The list shows “has a GPS location” next to any photo that carries one, so you can see it before you decide.
Keep in mind this only removes details from the file. It cannot remove anything you can see in the picture, like a house number behind the document.
A4 or US Letter, and pictures that are too small
The paper size starts on the one normally used where you are, worked out from your browser’s language. In the United States and Canada that is US Letter. Almost everywhere else it is A4. If you are sending the PDF to somebody in another country, choose their size instead, because it is what their printer will use.
Same shape as the picture makes every page match its photo, with no white bands around it. Some tools make such a page one point wide per pixel, so a normal phone photo becomes a page about 56 inches wide. Here the page takes the photo’s shape at the size of an ordinary sheet of paper.
If a picture is small for its page, the result says so. Anything under 150 dots per inch will look soft when printed, even though it looks fine on screen. A bigger margin or a different paper setting cannot fix that. Only a larger original can.
PNG to PDF, screenshots and see-through pictures
PNG to PDF works a little differently. The PNG is opened and its pixels are stored in the PDF without losing a single one, so screenshots stay crisp and the text in them stays readable.
If a PNG has see-through parts, like a logo with no background, they stay see-through in the PDF, so the page shows through them instead of a black box. And a picture that is entirely grey, like a scanned page, is stored as grey, which makes the file smaller.
WEBP, AVIF and iPhone HEIC photos are saved into the PDF as high quality JPG, because stored pixel for pixel they can make a PDF many times larger. If you need them exact, tick Keep every picture exact and the file will simply be bigger.
How to check nothing is uploaded
The big converters at the top of the search results ask you to upload your pictures first. Their pages say the files are deleted from their servers later, and I have no reason to think they are not. But a scanned ID or a signed contract is exactly the sort of thing many people are not allowed to hand to a free website.
You do not have to take my word for this page. Load it, then switch your wifi off, and make your PDF anyway. It still works, because there is nowhere for your pictures to go. Or open your browser’s developer tools with F12, click the Network tab, and watch nothing leave while you press the button.
Making a PDF from photos without any website
For completeness, your own device can often do this too. Note: I have not measured what each of these does to picture quality, so if sharpness matters, compare the PDF with the original photo before you send it.
- iPhone: in the Files app, tap Select, pick the photos, tap the three dots button, and choose Create PDF. This only works on photos saved to Files, not straight from the Photos app.
- Mac: select the pictures in Finder, right click, choose Quick Actions, then Create PDF.
- Windows: select the pictures, right click, choose Print, and pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. Untick Fit picture to frame first, or the edges of your pictures can be cropped off.
- Android: open the picture, choose Print from the menu, and pick Save as PDF. The menu names differ between phone makers, so it might not be in the same place on yours.
For beginners with one or two pictures, I suggest the built in way on your own device. For a lot of photos, anything you need the right way up, or anything with a location in it, this page is the easier choice.
Where this stops, honestly
- On a computer, iPhone HEIC photos only open in Safari. Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot read HEIC, and the page says so as soon as you add one. On the iPhone itself, the phone usually hands the browser a JPG copy, and Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes new photos save as JPG anyway.
- The text in your photos is not searchable. The PDF holds pictures of the pages. Finding words in it needs text recognition, which this does not do.
- A moving GIF becomes one still page. A PDF page cannot move, so you get its first frame.
- TIFF files only open in Safari. In any other browser, export them as JPG or PNG first.
- Print JPGs from design software are redrawn. I copied a red CMYK JPG into a PDF as it is and MuPDF showed it almost black. Some readers correct that and some do not, so these are turned into screen colours, and the result tells you it happened.
- Hundreds of big photos use a lot of memory. Everything happens in your browser, so an old phone may slow down past a few hundred megabytes. Make two PDFs and join them with merge PDF if that happens.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free, and is there a watermark?
Yes, it is free, there is no watermark, and there is no sign up. Nothing is added to your pages.
How many pictures can I add?
Up to 200 in one go. Some upload converters stop at 20. The real limit here is your device’s memory more than any number.
Can I change the order of the pages?
Yes. Use the up and down arrows next to each picture. The PDF pages follow the list from top to bottom.
Why is my PDF so big?
Because your photos went in without being squashed. A PDF of ten phone photos is about the size of those ten photos. Use the PDF compressor afterwards if you need it smaller, and it will tell you how much detail that costs.
Does it work on an iPhone or Android phone?
Yes, in the phone’s browser. Tap Choose pictures and pick from your photos. On an iPhone the photos arrive as JPG or open as HEIC in Safari, so they work there even though HEIC does not work in Chrome on a computer.
Can I turn it back into pictures later?
Not with this page. Going from PDF back to JPG means drawing each page, which needs a full PDF reader. I would rather say that plainly than offer a tool that does it badly.
If your pictures came out wrong in some way I have not thought of, ask me in the comment section below and I will love to help you out.