How to Turn Photos into a PDF
In 30 seconds: go to ilovepdf.com, pick JPG to PDF, upload your photos, check the card order, leave a small margin and click the red button. Free, no sign-up.
Someone asks you for a document as a PDF, and what you have is photos from your phone: an ID card, a receipt, some notes, the pages of a signed contract.
Putting them into a single PDF takes less than a minute and it is free. Below are the steps, plus the two things that actually matter: the page order and how to stop the photos coming out cropped.
Go to iLovePDF
Go to ilovepdf.com. If the site comes up in another language, change it in the top right.
In the grid of tools, find JPG to PDF and click it.
Upload your photos
Click the red Select JPG images button.
It is plural: upload all your photos at once and it merges them into a single PDF, one per page.
You can also drag them from your folder onto the red box. It accepts JPG and PNG.
Check the order
Check the order before anything else.
Each photo appears as a card, and the order of the cards is the order of the pages.
If you uploaded them out of order, grab a card and drop it where it belongs. Top right there is a button that sorts them by filename in one go — handy if your photos are named 1, 2, 3.
Do this now: once it is converted, you have to start over.
Set orientation and margin
Three settings in the right-hand panel, and all three matter:
- Page orientation — Portrait for normal documents, landscape if your photos are wide.
- Page size — Leave it on A4 if you are going to print it.
- Margin — This is the important one. With no margin the photo fills the whole sheet, and if your photo is a different shape from the paper it ends up cropped at the sides. With a small margin you see the whole photo.
Click "Convert to PDF"
With the settings in place, click the red Convert to PDF button on the right.
It takes a few seconds, depending on how many photos there are and how big they are.
Download the PDF
The download button appears and the PDF with all your photos lands in your downloads folder.
One tip: if the photos were large, the PDF can be heavy. If it gets rejected by email, run it through the compress PDF tool on this same site and it drops to a fraction of the size.
What happens to your files
The usual note about your files.
Your photos are uploaded to an iLovePDF server so they can be converted. They are processed there and delete themselves after a few hours.
For notes or a receipt, no problem. But if you are photographing your ID card or anything with personal data, think twice: an app on your own phone does the job without uploading anything.
And if you upload anyway, hit the bin icon when you are done.
And that is it: your photos turned into a PDF, free and in under a minute.
Keep hold of the two things that matter: check the order of the cards, and leave a margin so your photos do not come out cropped.
Common questions
The pages came out in the wrong order. Can I fix it without starting over?
Not once the PDF is made — you would have to upload the photos again. That is why it is worth checking the cards before converting. If you already have the finished PDF, the Organize PDF tool on the same site lets you reorder its pages without redoing everything.
Why do my photos come out cropped?
Because of the margin setting. With "no margin" the photo is stretched to fill the whole sheet, and if its shape does not match the paper, the sides get cut off. Choose a small or large margin and the whole photo fits inside the page. It is the single most common mistake with this tool.
Can I mix JPG and PNG in the same PDF?
Yes. The tool is called JPG to PDF but it also takes PNG, and it puts them in the same document without you doing anything special. The only thing that changes is that PNG files are usually heavier, so the resulting PDF can be bigger.
The PDF came out too heavy to email. What now?
Phone photos are several megabytes each, so ten of them make a heavy PDF. Run the finished file through the Compress PDF tool on this same site: for a document made of photos it usually cuts the size dramatically, because what weighs in a PDF is exactly the images.
Can I do this from my phone?
Yes, the site works the same in a phone browser, which makes sense because that is where the photos usually are. That said, if you do this often, most phones now have a built-in scanner: on iPhone it is in the Notes app, on Android it is in Google Drive. Those come out better than a photo, because they straighten the paper and remove shadows.
Is it safe to upload a photo of my ID card?
This is the case where I would not. The file travels encrypted and is deleted from the server after a few hours, but an ID card is exactly what you do not want floating around. Your phone's own scanner is better for that: it makes the PDF without uploading anything. If you do it anyway, hit the bin icon when you are done.
