JPG to PDF

Turning photos into a document people can open

Photographing a document instead of scanning it is now completely normal, and so is the moment afterwards when the form you need to submit refuses to accept a JPG. The conversion itself is trivial; the choices around it are what decide whether the result looks like a document or like someone's camera roll.

Page size: printable or exact

The first decision matters more than it appears.

A4 or Letter gives you a standard sheet with your photo placed on it. Anyone can print it, any system will accept it, and it looks like a document. This is the right answer for anything official, and the default here.

Fit the photo makes each page exactly the dimensions of its image. No white space, no fixed paper size. Good for a portfolio, a set of screenshots, or anything to be read on screen — and awkward to print, because every page is a different size.

The rule of thumb: if a human might print it, use A4 or Letter. If it will only ever be looked at, fit the photo.

Orientation and margins

Auto orientation turns each page to match its own photo, so a landscape shot gets a landscape page rather than being shrunk to fit a portrait one. In a mixed set this is almost always what you want — the alternative is pages where a wide photo occupies a third of the sheet.

Margins are white space around the image. A small margin looks intentional and gives a printer somewhere to grip; zero fills the sheet edge to edge, which suits photographs and looks cramped on documents. Most home printers cannot print to the very edge anyway, so a margin of around 24 points saves the outer few millimetres from being cut off.

Photos are always contained within the page, never cropped. A picture whose shape does not match the paper gets white space rather than losing its edges — the opposite choice would silently cut the bottom off a photographed page, which is exactly where signatures live.

Quality, and where it actually goes

A JPEG placed into a PDF is embedded as the JPEG it already was. It is not re-compressed, not re-encoded, and not degraded — the bytes are carried across. That means the PDF is roughly the size of the photos that went into it, and the picture quality is exactly what your camera produced.

PNGs are embedded directly too. Anything else — WebP, GIF, BMP — has to be converted to JPEG first, which is one lossy step, done at high quality.

HEIC is its own case. iPhones have shot HEIC by default since 2017, and neither PDF nor most software understands it, so it is decoded here before being embedded. If you only need the images rather than a PDF, the HEIC converter does that job directly.

Making a photographed document look scanned

A photo of a page and a scan of a page are recognisably different, and a few habits close most of the gap before you ever reach this tool:

• Flat, even light. Overhead light casts a shadow of your own head across the page. Near a window, with the light to one side, is better than any lamp directly above.
• Straight on. Photograph from directly above, not at an angle. A rectangular page should look rectangular in the frame.
• Fill the frame. Crop to the page. A document surrounded by a table top wastes resolution and reads as casual.
• Steady hands. Blur is the one thing no later processing recovers.

If the finished PDF is too large to send, run it through the PDF compressor rather than re-photographing everything at lower quality.

Nothing is uploaded

Photos are read from your disk, decoded and assembled into a PDF entirely in your browser. There is no server, which is why there is no account, no photo limit and no watermark.

The pictures people turn into PDFs are usually documents: passports, contracts, medical forms, signed pages, receipts with an address on them. Those should not need a trip through someone else's server to acquire a .pdf extension.