Combine many pictures into one PDF

Quick steps

1. Open JPG to PDF and choose all your pictures at once, or drop them onto the page from a folder on a computer.
2. Check the numbers on the cards. Each number is a page number. Drag cards to fix the order.
3. Pick a page size and margin that suit the job (the table below helps).
4. Leave Make on One PDF and press Convert. Each picture becomes one page.
5. Check the PDF, and make it smaller afterwards if you need to (see making it smaller).

Everything happens in your browser. The pictures are not uploaded, and we set no limit on how many you add.

Adding many pictures at once

On a computer, press Choose pictures and select several files in the window that opens. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click to pick them one by one, or click the first, hold Shift and click the last to pick a whole run. Ctrl+A (Cmd+A) selects everything in the folder. You can also select the files in a folder window and drag them anywhere onto the page.

On a phone, tap Choose pictures and tap each photo in your gallery before you confirm. Converting photos to PDF on your phone has the steps for iPhone and Android.

From several folders, add the first group, then press Add more pictures for each next group. New pictures always go to the end of the cards.

The cards appear in the order your device hands the files over. That is often the order you see in the folder, but not always. So never assume. Look at the numbers, and at the file name under each card, before you convert.

Getting the order right, even with dozens of pictures

With three pictures you can fix the order by eye. With thirty, a little planning saves a lot of dragging:

• Number the files first. Names like 01-cover.jpg, 02-page.jpg, 03-page.jpg tell you at a glance where each card belongs. Use 01, 02 and not 1, 2, so that 10 doesn't sort before 2. Windows and Mac can rename a whole selection of files in one go with a counting number.
• Photograph in reading order. When you take the pictures yourself, shoot page 1 first and the last page last. Phone cameras name photos by number or by date and time, so the names already run in the order you took them.
• Add in batches. If the pictures come from different places, add them group by group in the order they belong. Each batch lands at the end, so the order builds up as you go.
• Remove duplicates as you go. Two shots of the same page are common. Press the X on the weaker one.

Moving cards. With a mouse, drag a card from anywhere. On a touch screen, drag it by the numbered handle in its corner. With a keyboard, press Tab to reach a card's handle and use the arrow keys, with Home and End to send it to the start or the end. That last trick is the fastest way to move one picture from the back of a long list to the front. The order part of the guide has the details.

If you change anything after converting, the Convert button comes back, so the PDF you download always matches the cards you see.

Page size and margins: which fits which job

There are three page sizes (Same as picture, A4 and Letter) and three margins (None, Small of about 7 mm, and Big of about 18 mm). Pictures are always scaled to fit inside the margins and centred, never cropped or stretched. Here is how the choices match real jobs:

Same as picture makes the cleanest PDF for screens. Each page is 297 mm on its long side, like A4, so the pages are a familiar size, but their shapes follow the pictures. If your pictures have many different shapes, the PDF will too. That is fine on a screen and awkward on paper.

A4 or Letter put every picture on the same size of sheet. Pictures that don't share the sheet's shape get white space on two sides. A long, narrow receipt on upright A4 gets white at the left and right, and an upright phone photo usually gets a band of white above and below.

Margins and printing. Many printers can't print right to the edge of the paper, so with no margin, the outer few millimetres of a picture may be lost on paper. If the PDF will ever be printed, Small is the safe choice.

Mixing upright and wide pictures

Real piles of pictures are rarely all one shape: a few wide photos, a tall receipt, some phone screenshots. Here is what each setting does with a mix:

Auto is the best general choice for a mix: every picture gets as big as the sheet allows. Pick Portrait when every page must stand upright, for example when a form says so or the pages will be stapled and read like a book. Pick Landscape for a set of slides or wide screenshots.

A wide chart on an upright page. Turn the picture a quarter turn with the round arrow on its card. It then runs along the length of the page and comes out bigger, and the reader turns the page to read it, as with a wide table in a printed report.

A picture that is sideways or upside down needs the same round arrow. Each press turns it 90° clockwise, without compressing it again. If you notice a sideways page only after you have made the PDF, Rotate PDF turns pages in the finished file.

When printing a PDF with both upright and sideways pages, check the print preview, so the sideways pages fill the sheet the way you want.

PNG, WebP, screenshots and other picture types

You can mix picture types freely in one PDF. The converter takes JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF, plus HEIC and TIFF in browsers that can open them, such as Safari. What matters is what happens to each:

• JPG photos go in exactly as they are, without being compressed again.
• Screenshots are often PNG. A simple PNG, with no see-through parts, also goes in exactly as it is, so text in a screenshot stays crisp.
• PNGs with see-through parts are stored again without loss, and the see-through parts become white, like paper.
• Pictures saved from websites are often WebP. Lossless WebP is stored without loss. A WebP photo becomes a high-quality JPG, because a PDF can't hold WebP.
• GIFs give only their first frame. AVIF and HEIC photos become high-quality JPGs.

You don't have to work this out yourself. When the PDF is ready, the result says it in plain words, for example "4 pictures went in exactly as they were; 2 were stored again as high-quality JPGs, as PDFs can't hold their format." The full table of picture types is in the guide.

A tip for screenshots of documents: keep them as PNG. Converting a screenshot to JPG before adding it only blurs the edges of the letters.

How big the PDF will be

Rule of thumb: add up the sizes of your pictures. JPGs and simple PNGs go in as they are, and the PDF adds very little around them. Our measured results, in Chrome on a computer, show it:

Two things follow from this. First, page size and margins don't change the file size: the same photos on A4 made the same 62.4 MB. Second, the exceptions are the pictures that have to be stored again. A WebP photo becomes a JPG, which here was bigger than the WebP.

The result line shows the numbers for your own pictures, like "20 pictures, 62.4 MB" with the PDF's size next to it, so you know where you stand before you send anything.

Why not shrink while converting? Because every time a JPG is saved again, it loses a little detail for good. Keeping your pictures untouched gives you the best possible PDF, and you decide afterwards how small it needs to be.

Making the PDF smaller afterwards

A PDF of phone photos is mostly pictures, and that is exactly the kind of PDF that shrinks the most. Pick the tool by what you need:

• Smaller for email or chat: our PDF compressor. You pick a level, Smallest, Recommended or Best quality, which keeps pictures at up to 100, 150 or 220 pixels per inch. In our tests at Recommended, our 4-page sample file, a colour scan made of pictures just like a PDF of photos, went from 9.96 MB to 563 KB, 94% smaller. See choosing a level.
• Under an exact limit, like 100 KB or 2 MB: Resize PDF. It tries sizes until it finds the sharpest version under your number. The same 9.96 MB sample scan came out at 91 KB for a 100 KB limit.

Shrinking before you convert also helps:

• Leave out pictures nobody needs, like blurry repeats and blank backs of pages.
• Crop away the table or floor around a document in your gallery app first. Less background means fewer pixels to store.
• Keep your original pictures and the full-quality PDF. If one place wants 100 KB and another 2 MB, start each time from the full-quality PDF, not from an already shrunken copy.

Very many pictures, and fixing the PDF later

Speed and memory. In our test on a computer, 20 photos of 12 megapixels took about 4 seconds to show their cards, about 0.2 seconds a photo. Pressing Convert then took under 0.1 seconds, because the photos were read while the cards appeared, and saving took 1 to 2 seconds. At its busiest, the browser used about 100 MB more memory than when idle.

Huge sets. We set no limit on the number of pictures. For a very long set on a phone, it can be easier to make the PDF in parts, say one per chapter or month, and then join the parts with Merge PDF. Each part is quicker to check, too.

Very large pictures. JPGs and simple PNGs go in at any size. Other pictures, which the browser has to open, are scaled down if they are over 64 megapixels, or 16 megapixels on iPhone and iPad.

Fixing the PDF after it is made:

• Forgot a picture? If the page is still open, add it, drag it into place and convert again. If not, convert the missing picture on its own and join the two PDFs with Merge PDF.
• Pages in the wrong order, or one too many? Organize PDF moves and deletes pages in a finished PDF.
• Need only some of the pages for one person? Split PDF takes them out as a new file.