Capture: good input makes a good PDF
Conversion can't fix a poor photo, so a few seconds of care at capture pays off:
- Light: daylight or even room light. Avoid your own shadow over the page and avoid flash glare on glossy paper.
- Angle: hold the phone directly above the page, parallel to it. Angled shots make pages look like trapezoids.
- Background: a plain, contrasting surface (a dark table for white paper) makes the page edges clear.
- Fill the frame: the page should take up most of the photo. Crop away the rest afterwards.
Many phones include a document-scanning mode (in the camera, notes or files app) that straightens and crops automatically — worth using if you have it.
Prepare the images
- Format: JPG to PDF accepts JPG and PNG. iPhones often save HEIC — change the camera format to "Most Compatible", or export as JPEG.
- Names: number the files (
page-01.jpg,page-02.jpg) so they load in order. - Size: full-resolution photos are often 3–5 MB each. If the PDF must be small, share or export the photos at a reduced size first.
Choosing the page size
| Choose | When | Result |
|---|---|---|
| US Letter | Recipient in the US or Canada; will be printed | Portrait 8.5 × 11 in pages, image fitted with a small margin |
| A4 | Recipient almost anywhere else; will be printed | Portrait 210 × 297 mm pages, image fitted with a small margin |
| Auto | Mostly viewed on screen; landscape images; screenshots | Each page takes the exact shape of its image, no margin |
Images are never cropped or stretched — they're scaled to fit and centred. A landscape photo on a portrait page will have white space above and below; choose Auto if that bothers you.
Fixing sideways photos
Phones often save a photo in the sensor's orientation and add a tag saying "display this rotated". Your gallery follows the tag, so the photo looks right there — but the image data placed into a PDF can appear turned. If a page comes out sideways, open the PDF in Rotate PDF, choose Selected pages, enter the page numbers and rotate. It's lossless and takes seconds.
Keeping the PDF a sensible size
JPGs are placed into the PDF without re-compression, so the PDF is roughly the total of your photos. If it's too large:
- Crop photos tightly — less background, fewer pixels.
- Resize photos before converting; around 1,700–2,500 pixels on the long edge is plenty for a document page.
- Or compress the finished PDF with Compress PDF in Extra mode, which is designed for image-based pages.
Remember that a PDF made from photos is image-based: its text can't be searched or selected. See scanned vs text-based PDFs.