Combine images into a PDF
Photograph your documents, drop them in the order you want, and get one PDF. JPEGs are embedded exactly as they are — no re-compression, no quality loss, and no upload.
Why the JPEGs come out unchanged
A PDF doesn't store pictures in some special PDF format. It wraps them — and one of the formats it can wrap directly is JPEG. So when you add a JPEG here, its bytes are copied into the PDF untouched and marked as a JPEG. Nothing is decoded, re-compressed, or degraded on the way through.
That matters because most converters don't do this. They decode your photo, re-encode it at whatever quality they picked, and hand you a PDF that's both softer and often larger than the original files were. You can check this one yourself: add three photos, and the PDF should land within a few kilobytes of their combined size.
PNG and WebP can't be embedded this way, since PDF has no native support for either. Those are converted to JPEG first, and the page list marks which of your files that applies to before you build anything.
Two cases that get handled quietly
Sideways photos. A phone camera usually stores the picture in the orientation the sensor saw it and attaches a note saying which way up it belongs. Copy those bytes into a PDF and the note gets lost, which is why documents photographed in portrait so often end up lying on their side. Here the rotation is written into the PDF's own drawing instructions instead — the image data still isn't touched, but it lands the right way up.
Progressive JPEGs. These load in blurry passes on slow connections, and they're common on the web. PDF readers are inconsistent about them; Acrobat has historically refused them outright. Those files get converted to a standard baseline JPEG rather than embedded, so the PDF opens everywhere. The page list marks it when this happens.
Getting a smaller file
A PDF of photos is roughly as large as the photos were. Ten pictures from a modern phone will produce something around 40MB, which many email systems and upload portals will reject.
The fix is to shrink the images before assembling them: run them through compress to an exact size first, at something like 500KB each, then bring the results here. Ten pages at 500KB is a 5MB PDF that still reads perfectly well on screen. Compressing first also gives you control over the tradeoff, rather than letting a converter guess at it.
Choosing page settings
- A4 or Letter — for anything that might be printed or sent somewhere official. Your image is centered on a standard page with a margin, which is what a document is expected to look like.
- Fit page to image — the page becomes exactly the shape of your photo, with no borders. Better for portfolios, screenshots, and anything meant to be read on a screen.
- Match each image orientation gives each page its own direction, so a mix of portrait and landscape photos won't leave half of them shrunk into the middle of the wrong-shaped page.