How to Convert Photos to PDF
Turning photos into a PDF is usually about submitting something: receipts for an expense claim, photographed ID, or a signed form. Here is how to combine several images into one document, on every platform.
The quick answer
Upload your images to an image-to-PDF tool, arrange them in order, and download a single PDF with one image per page.
- Open the image to PDF tool.
- Drag in all your photos at once.
- Use the arrows to set the page order.
- Choose an orientation, or leave it matching each image.
- Click Create PDF and download.
On iPhone, without any app
Open Photos, tap Select, choose your images, then tap the share button and choose Print. On the print preview, pinch outwards on the thumbnail as though zooming in — this quietly turns the preview into a PDF. Then share it to Files or Mail.
It is an odd hidden gesture, but it is built in and nothing leaves your phone. A caveat: iPhones shoot HEIC by default, and this route handles that fine, whereas many online tools do not accept HEIC at all.
On Android
Open the images in Google Photos, tap the share button, choose Print, then select Save as PDF as the destination. Selecting several photos first produces a multi-page PDF.
On Mac
Select the images in Finder, right-click, and choose Quick Actions then Create PDF. macOS produces a combined PDF immediately, in the order the files were selected. To reorder afterwards, open it in Preview and drag the thumbnails.
On Windows
Select your images in File Explorer, right-click and choose Print. In the dialog, pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer, choose Full page photo, and print. All selected images go into one PDF.
Watch the layout setting: the default sometimes places several images per page rather than one each.
Why the text in your photo is not searchable
A photographed document placed into a PDF is still a photograph. You cannot select the text, search it, or copy from it — it is a picture that happens to show words.
Making it searchable requires OCR. Google Drive does this free: upload the PDF, right-click, and Open with Google Docs. If you are submitting a form that requires "a PDF of your document", a photo-based PDF is normally accepted; if it requires "a searchable PDF", it is not.
Keeping the file small enough to send
Modern phone photos are several megabytes each, so five receipts can easily produce a 25 MB PDF that bounces off an email limit.
Resize the images to around 1600 pixels wide before creating the PDF. Documents photographed for legibility need far less resolution than the camera captures, and the resulting PDF is often a tenth of the size with no practical loss.