How to turn a picture into a PDF, on any device

Turning a picture into a PDF is one of those jobs that sounds like it needs software and does not. Every phone and computer you own can already do it, usually through a menu nobody thinks to look in, because the feature is hidden inside printing rather than inside converting.

This guide has the steps for each device, and, more usefully, what each of them quietly gets wrong. The built-in routes are excellent for one photo and frustrating for twelve, and most of them re-compress your picture on the way through.

Why anyone wants this

A PDF is not a better picture. It is a better envelope. People want one because the thing at the other end asked for a document rather than an image: a claims form that only takes PDFs, a university that wants one file rather than fifteen, an accountant who wants the receipts in order, a landlord who wants the meter readings dated.

Three properties do the work. A PDF holds many pages in one file, in an order you chose. It opens on everything, including the ten year old machine at the other end. And it has a page size, so what arrives looks like a document rather than a picture whose size depends on the viewer.

On an iPhone or iPad

The route is through Files rather than Photos, which is the part people miss.

1. In Photos, select the picture, tap the share button and choose Save to Files. Pick a folder.
2. Open the Files app and go to that folder.
3. Long-press the file and choose Create PDF. The PDF appears beside it.

For several photos at once, select them all in Files, tap the three dots at the top right and choose Create PDF. They go in the order the folder is sorted, so set the sort order you want first: tap the sort control and choose Name or Date.

There is a second route worth knowing, because it gives you a page size. Open the photo, tap share, choose Print, then pinch outwards on the print preview. That gesture turns the preview into a PDF, which you can then share or save. It is undocumented, it has worked for years, and it is the only built-in way on iOS to get a photo onto a specific paper size.

Both routes handle HEIC, the format an iPhone saves photos in, without any conversion. That is not true anywhere else, which is the subject of HEIC versus JPG versus PNG.

On Android

Android has no “create PDF” command, so the route is printing.

1. Open the picture in Google Photos or the Files app.
2. Open the menu (three dots) and choose Print.
3. At the top, where the printer is named, choose Save as PDF.
4. Set the paper size and orientation if the options are shown, then tap the round save button.

This makes one PDF containing one picture. To put several photos into one document you need an app, because the print route takes one at a time. Google Drive can do it on some devices: upload the images, then use the Drive app’s scan feature, though that is really a different job.

The print route also scales the picture to the paper size and re-compresses it, so a 12 megapixel photo comes out as a page-sized JPEG rather than the photo you had.

On Windows

1. Right-click the picture and choose Print, or open it in Photos and press Ctrl and P.
2. In the Printer list, choose Microsoft Print to PDF.
3. Set the paper size, the orientation and the layout. The layout options here are the useful part: “Full page photo” fills the paper and crops, while the numbered layouts place one or more photos with margins.
4. Untick Fit picture to frame if you do not want the edges cropped.
5. Click Print, then choose a filename and location.

You can select several pictures first and print them all at once. Windows will put one per page, or several per page in the smaller layouts. It uses the order shown in the folder, so sort the folder before you start.

The same caveat applies: this is a print pipeline, so the image is rasterised at the print resolution and re-compressed. It is fine for a receipt, and it is not the route for a photograph you care about.

On a Mac

macOS is the best of the built-in routes for several pictures.

1. In Finder, select all the images. Click them in the order you want if you are using icon view, or sort the folder first in list view.
2. Right-click, choose Quick Actions, then Create PDF.
3. A PDF appears in the same folder, one picture per page.

If the order comes out wrong, open the PDF in Preview, show the sidebar with View then Thumbnails, and drag the pages around. Preview will also let you delete a page, rotate one, and drag pages in from another PDF, which makes it a decent PDF assembler that everyone already has.

Preview’s other trick: open a picture, choose File then Export as PDF, and you get a one-page document at the picture’s own size rather than on a paper size.

In a browser, when the built-in ways run out

The built-in routes share three limits, and they are the reasons people go looking for something else.

Order. They use the order the files happen to be in. A folder of receipts named by the camera comes out in camera order, not the order you want, and only Preview on a Mac lets you fix it afterwards.

The page. Printing gives you paper sizes and a “fit” that you cannot see until it is done. If you want the page to be the shape of the picture, or a 10 mm margin, or a picture that fills the page, you are guessing and re-doing.

Quality. Everything that goes through a print pipeline is re-compressed. It is usually invisible, and it is real, and it is entirely avoidable: the PDF format stores photographs as JPEG already, so a tool that understands that can copy your photo in without touching it.

A browser tool solves all three, and the good ones do it without uploading anything. Drop the pictures in, drag them into order, pick the paper size and margin, look at the page before you save it, and download the document. Files never leave the tab, which matters when the pictures are of a passport, a payslip or a contract, which is most of the time. Is it safe to upload photos online is worth reading before you paste anything sensitive into a free converter.

Choosing the page

Three settings decide what a picture looks like as a page, and they are the same three in every tool worth using.

Paper size. A4 and US Letter are what forms and printers expect. “Same as the picture” makes a page the exact shape of the photo, which looks better on a screen and is the right answer when nobody is going to print it. A good tool reads the resolution written inside the file when it does this, so a 300 dpi scan becomes a page the size of the thing that was scanned rather than one three times too big.

How it sits. Fit puts the whole picture on the page and leaves bars where the shapes disagree. Fill covers the paper and lets the edges fall outside it. Stretch distorts the picture to the paper exactly, and is almost never what anybody wants. A photo is roughly 3:2 and A4 is roughly 1:1.41, so something always has to give.

Margin. Zero is right for a photo. Ten to fifteen millimetres is right for anything that may be printed, because most printers cannot print to the edge and will shrink the page to fit if you ask them to.

Scanning a document with a phone instead

If what you are really doing is photographing a paper document, do not photograph it. Both phones have a scanner built in, and it is much better at this than the camera: it finds the edges, corrects the perspective so the page is square, increases the contrast so the paper is white, and saves a multi-page PDF directly.

On an iPhone: open Notes, start a note, tap the camera and choose Scan Documents. On Android: open Google Drive, tap the plus button and choose Scan.

The result is a proper document rather than a photograph of one, at a fraction of the size, and it goes straight to PDF with no conversion step at all.

The short version

For one picture, use what you already have: Create PDF in Files on iOS, Print to PDF on Android and Windows, Quick Actions in Finder on a Mac. For several pictures in a particular order, with a page size you can see before you commit, and without re-compressing anything, use a browser tool that does the work on your own device. And if the picture is of a piece of paper, use the scanner in Notes or Drive instead, which was built for exactly that.

The steps, in short

1. On an iPhone or iPad. Save the photo to Files, then long-press it and choose Create PDF. For several photos, select them all, tap the three dots and choose Create PDF; they follow the order in the folder.
2. On Android. Open the picture in Google Photos or the Files app, choose Print from the menu, then pick "Save as PDF" as the printer and tap the save button.
3. On Windows. Right-click the picture, choose Print, and set the printer to "Microsoft Print to PDF". Choose the paper size and whether it is portrait or landscape, then click Print and pick where to save it.
4. On a Mac. Select the images in Finder, right-click and choose Quick Actions then Create PDF. They go into one document in the order they are selected.
5. In a browser, for control over the order and the page. Drop the pictures on getPNG's image to PDF page, drag them into the order you want, choose the paper size and margin, and save. Nothing is uploaded.

Questions

How do I combine several photos into one PDF?

On a Mac, select them all in Finder and use Quick Actions then Create PDF. On an iPhone, select them in Files and choose Create PDF. On Windows the built-in print route makes one PDF per picture, so for several you need a tool; in a browser you can drop them all in, drag them into order and save one document.

Does turning a photo into a PDF reduce its quality?

It depends entirely on the tool. The PDF format stores photographs as JPEG, in exactly the form a .jpg file uses, so a good tool copies the photo in with no change at all. Printing to PDF, which is how the built-in routes on Windows and Android work, re-compresses the picture and often reduces its resolution to fit the paper.

Why is my PDF so much bigger than the photo?

Usually because the tool stored the picture losslessly instead of as JPEG, which can be five to ten times larger for a photograph. Some printing routes also upscale the image to the paper size first, which makes it larger again.

How do I change the order of the pages?

The built-in routes use the order the files are selected or sorted in, which is the usual reason a scanned document comes out back to front. A tool that shows the pages as thumbnails and lets you drag them is the reliable way.

Can I make a PDF from an iPhone HEIC photo without converting it first?

On an iPhone, yes: Files handles HEIC natively. On a Windows PC or in most browsers, HEIC will not open at all without extra software. A browser tool with its own HEIC decoder can take the photo straight to a PDF in one step.

How do I make the picture fill the whole page with no white border?

The picture and the paper have to be the same shape, or something has to give. Either choose a page the same shape as the picture, or set the tool to fill the page and accept that the edges fall outside it. A photo on A4 will always leave bars somewhere, because a photo is not A4 shaped.

Is it safe to use an online image to PDF converter?

Most of them upload your files to a server, convert them there and keep them for some period. For holiday snaps that hardly matters; for a passport scan, a payslip or a signed contract it is exactly the kind of file you should not be handing to a stranger. Tools that work inside your browser do not send the file anywhere.