How to turn photos into a PDF
Updated October 7, 2026
It’s the simplest way to send a document you photographed with your phone: instead of ten separate images, a single PDF with the pages in the right order. Images to PDF creates it on your device, with one image per page.
Taking good photos
- Lay the document on a flat surface in good light, with no shadows or glare.
- Shoot straight on, with the camera parallel to the page, and let the document fill the screen.
- Check that the text is sharp: if you have to zoom in to read it, the photo isn’t good enough.
Creating the PDF, step by step
- Open Images to PDF and drag the images (JPG, PNG, WebP or TIFF) into the workspace.
- Drag the thumbnails until they’re in the right order: each image goes on its own page, in that order.
- Choose the “Page size” (“A4”, “Letter” or “Same as image”), the “Orientation” and the “Margins”.
- Click “Convert to PDF” and download the result.
Which page size to choose
- “A4”: the most common size in Europe for printing and sending documents.
- “Letter”: the standard in the United States.
- “Same as image”: each page is the size of its image. To avoid white margins, also choose “No margins” under “Margins”. Good for scans and screenshots.
A multi-page TIFF gives you several pages in the PDF. Photos from your phone come out the right way up: MovaDoc reads the orientation the camera stores in each photo.
The size of the PDF
JPG photos go into the PDF as they are, without being recompressed: they don’t lose quality, but a PDF with lots of phone photos gets very large. To send it by email, first make the photos smaller with Compress image, which also removes the camera data (such as the location), and only then create the PDF. If the PDF is already made, try Compress PDF: the guide How to reduce the size of a PDF explains which level to choose.
Making the text searchable
A PDF made of photos has no text: you can’t search for a word or copy a paragraph. OCR PDF recognizes the text on the pages and adds it, invisible, on top of each one. The guide How to make a PDF searchable explains how.
What to check at the end
- Are the pages in the right order and all the right way up?
- Is the text legible when you zoom in?
- Is the file small enough to send?
- Is there data the recipient doesn’t need? Redact it before you send the file.