An expense system that wants "one PDF with all receipts". A teacher who wants homework as a single file, not eleven photos. A landlord, bank or visa portal that asks for a copy of your passport and two utility bills as a PDF. In every case you've got photos on your phone and need one tidy document.
JPG to PDF does exactly that: each image becomes a page, in the order you choose. The PDF is built on your own phone or computer, so a photo of your passport isn't uploaded anywhere along the way.
Which image types work
The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP. That covers screenshots, most photos and images saved from the web.
The odd one out is HEIC, the format iPhones use for photos by default. It isn't on the list. In practice, when you pick photos from an iPhone through the browser's upload button, iOS often hands them over as JPG, but that doesn't always happen. If a photo won't load, share it as JPG first (or change Settings > Camera > Formats to Most Compatible for future photos). Android phones save JPG by default, so this rarely comes up there.
Turning the photos into a PDF
- Open JPG to PDF and drop the images onto the page, or tap Upload images. You can add more later.
- Drag the images into the order you want under Page order, or use the arrows.
- Choose a "Page size", an "Orientation" and a "Margin" (more on these below).
- With two or more images, leave "Merge all images into one PDF" ticked if you want a single file.
- Tap Convert to PDF, then download.
If you untick "Merge all images into one PDF", you get a separate PDF for each image, downloaded together as a ZIP. That's what you want when a portal has one upload slot per document (front of ID here, proof of address there).
Fit to image or a real paper size
This is the setting that matters most, and the right answer depends on where the PDF is going.
"Fit to image" makes each page exactly the size of its photo. Nothing is scaled or padded. It looks clean on screen, but a phone photo has no real "paper size", so the pages can come out at odd dimensions, and each page may be a different size if your photos were cropped differently. If someone prints it, the printer has to guess how to scale it.
A paper size like A4 (the default) or Letter puts each image on a standard page, centred and scaled to fit. Use this for anything that might be printed, and for official uploads like visa applications, HR forms or insurance claims. Those systems often expect normal pages, and a reviewer scrolling through a PDF where every page is a different shape is not having a good day.
"Orientation" set to Auto turns the page to match each photo: a wide photo gets a sideways page, a tall one stays upright. That's usually what you want. Pick Portrait if every page must be upright.
"Margin" can be "No margin", "Small margin (0.5 in)" or "Large margin (1 in)". For printing, a small margin is safer, since most home printers can't print right to the edge. For on-screen use, no margin wastes less space.
Why sideways photos come out upright
Most phones don't actually rotate the image when you take a picture holding the phone sideways. They save the pixels as the sensor captured them and add a small note in the file (the EXIF orientation tag) saying "rotate this 90 degrees when displaying". Your gallery app reads that note. Some software doesn't, which is why a photo can look fine on your phone and appear sideways after uploading somewhere.
JPG to PDF reads the EXIF tag and turns each photo upright before placing it on the page. If a page still ends up the wrong way (because the phone guessed wrong, which happens when you shoot flat on a table), fix it afterwards with Rotate PDF.
Phone photos make big PDFs, so compress after
A modern phone photo is often several megabytes. Twelve receipts at 3 to 4 MB each gives you a PDF of around 40 MB, which is over the attachment limit of Gmail (25 MB) and far over the 2 or 5 MB caps many upload forms use.
Run the finished PDF through Compress PDF. A 12-megapixel photo placed on an A4 page has far more detail than any screen or printer will show at that size, so compression can scale it down and re-save it as a JPEG at a sensible quality. With the default "Good" setting, the text on a receipt usually stays perfectly readable and the file gets a lot smaller. The guide to making a PDF small enough to email explains the settings in more detail.
If you need to add a photo to an existing PDF rather than build a new one, Merge PDF also accepts images and turns each one into a page.
Taking photos that read well as a PDF
Most of the quality is decided when you take the picture:
- Put the paper on a flat, dark surface. A white receipt on a white table is hard to see where it ends.
- Use daylight or a bright room, and avoid the flash. Flash leaves a glare spot right where the total usually is.
- Hold the phone directly above the page, not at an angle, so the text doesn't shrink towards the top.
- Fill the frame with the document. Background around it is wasted pixels and makes the text smaller on the page.
- Flatten crumpled receipts first. Shadows in creases can hide numbers.
On an iPhone, that's Scan Documents in the Notes app or the Files app; on Android, the scan button in the Google Drive app. The guide to scanning documents with your phone walks through it. Keep JPG to PDF for the things scanners handle badly: screenshots, photos you already took, and images people sent you.
Also useful: Compress PDF · Merge PDF
