JPG to PDF

JPG to PDF: see the pages as you build them, set the order, and save one file

Add several photos and the pages of your PDF appear in the page board above, exactly as they will look. Drag the photos or use [Earlier] and [Later] to set the order, pick the paper, margin and number of photos per page, then click [Save PDF] to get a single PDF file. The tool builds the PDF at each of four quality levels to measure it, so you can see the real file size before you save and pick one that fits an upload limit.

For example, the three sample photos (1.73 MB) combined on A4 come to 1.74 MB at Original, 1.47 MB at Standard and 718 KB at Small. At Original, a JPG goes in without being recompressed, and details such as the GPS location are left out. Your photos are never sent to a server; everything happens in the browser you are using now.

When to turn photos into a PDF

• Submitting homework or paperwork as one file: if you photographed handwritten work or a form page by page, a single PDF in page order lets the reader flip through it in sequence. It also suits upload forms that accept only one attachment.
• Sending receipts and proof of purchase: a receipt is long and narrow, so one per page leaves a lot of empty space. Putting 2 or 4 on a page cuts the page count and the paper you print.
• Printing photos on Letter or A4: printing a photo file directly gives a different size on different printers. A PDF at a fixed paper size keeps the margins and layout the way you set them.
• Sending iPhone photos to other devices: HEIC photos will not open on many Windows PCs or on some websites. A PDF opens on almost any device or upload form.
• Handing over photos without location data: phone photos often carry the coordinates of where they were taken. The PDF made here keeps no camera or location details.

How to use it

1. Drag your photos onto the workspace or click [Choose photos]. You can pick several at once, and you can paste screenshots with Ctrl+V.
2. Check the order on the page board. Drag a photo to a new spot, or select it and click [Earlier] or [Later]. To match file-name order, click [By name].
3. For a sideways photo, select it and click [Rotate]. Each click turns it 90° clockwise.
4. Choose paper, orientation, margin, per page and fit; the page board updates right away.
5. Look at the PDF size shown for each quality level, pick one, and click [Save PDF].

Paper, orientation and photos per page

Choose between A4, Letter and Photo size. Photo size shapes each page to the proportions of its photo and sets the long side to the A4 long side (297 mm). For a PDF that will be viewed on screen, Photo size leaves no empty margins and looks clean; for a PDF you will print, pick Letter in the US and Canada, or A4 almost everywhere else.

With orientation on Auto, each page uses whichever orientation lets the photo come out larger. Landscape photos go on landscape pages and portrait photos on portrait pages, and when both are equal the page is portrait. If the recipient needs every page in the same orientation, choose Portrait or Landscape yourself.

With 2 per page, photos stack top and bottom on a portrait page and sit side by side on a landscape page; 4 per page makes a 2 × 2 grid. The gap between photos equals the margin you chose, and any empty cell on the last page stays blank. The number at the top left of each photo on the page board shows the reading order.

Show all or fill the page

Show all fits the whole photo inside its cell without cropping. When the photo and the cell have different proportions, white paper remains above and below or at the sides. Fill page enlarges the photo until the cell is completely covered and cuts off whatever sticks out. The cropped part stays in the PDF as data but is not visible on the page.

Even with the margin set to None, Show all can leave white bars. The margin is the distance between the paper edge and the cell, while the bars come from the difference in proportions between the cell and the photo.

Four quality levels and the PDF size

The three levels other than Original shrink the long side of each photo to a set number of pixels and recompress it as a JPG. The pixel counts are chosen to give a print resolution of 300, 200 and 150 dpi when a photo fills an A4 page. A photo that is already smaller is not enlarged, and if the original JPG is smaller than the recompressed result, the original data goes in instead.

The sample photos are two 2,000 × 1,500 px photos and one receipt. At High there is nothing to shrink, and recompressing at quality 92 would make the file larger, so the original JPG goes in as it is and the size matches Original. With a 12-megapixel (4,032 × 3,024 px) phone photo, shrinking starts at High and the differences between levels grow. Putting 4 photos on a page leaves the three samples at Standard at about 1.47 MB, almost the same, because the photo data, not the number of pages, decides the PDF size.

What Original keeps untouched

A PDF can hold JPG data without decoding it. ISO 32000-1 says the DCTDecode filter "decodes grayscale or colour image data that has been encoded in the JPEG baseline format." At Original, this tool copies the JPG's picture data into the PDF byte for byte, so no pixel changes and none of the blur from recompressing appears.

What it leaves out is everything that is not picture data: EXIF (the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, the device name and the time), XMP, notes added by photo editors, and the extra images iPhones append after the photo (MPF and HDR brightness information). That is why an HDR iPhone photo looks like a normal-brightness photo in the PDF. The ICC color profile is carried over as a PDF color space, so wide-gamut photos such as Display P3 keep their colors.

PNG, GIF and BMP go in with lossless compression (Flate), and transparent areas are kept with the PDF 1.4 soft mask (SMask). WebP, HEIC and AVIF cannot go into a PDF directly, so they are converted to a quality-95 JPG.

Why portrait photos do not end up sideways

A phone stores a photo taken upright with the pixels of a landscape image and often writes 6 in the EXIF Orientation value, meaning "turn 90° clockwise when displaying" (Exif 2.32 defines 6 as the arrangement of 1 turned 90 degrees clockwise). A PDF does not read this value, so if only the picture data were copied, the photo would lie on its side in the PDF.

This tool reads the orientation value and builds the rotation into the matrix that places the photo in the PDF. A PDF draws an image in a unit square and then uses the cm operator to set its position, direction and size on the page (ISO 32000-1 8.9.4), so an upright photo can be made without recompressing the picture data. Rotation from [Rotate] is applied the same way.

Photos you can add

Only Safari 17 and later (macOS and iOS) can open HEIC directly; Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot. So the tool downloads the libheif decoder only when you add a HEIC photo and decodes it itself. The format is judged from the first bytes of the file, so a HEIC renamed to .jpg is still recognized as HEIC.

Common mistakes

• Assuming photos go in by file name: the PDF page order is the order on the page board. The order in which you pick photos differs from device to device, so check it before saving or click [By name].
• Assuming Orientation will stand a sideways photo upright: [Orientation] is the direction of the paper; the photo stays as it is. To fix a sideways photo, select it and click [Rotate].
• Assuming 4 per page makes the file smaller: the page count drops but the photo data stays the same, so the size is almost unchanged. Use the quality level to reduce it.
• Picking Small and then finding the text unreadable: a dense, small-print document saved at Small (150 dpi) can turn blurry. Save documents at Standard or higher, then zoom into the saved PDF and check the numbers and dates.
• Expecting to search for text inside a photo: text in a photo is a picture, so it cannot be searched or copied after conversion to PDF. If you need the text, extract it first with image to text.
• Deleting the original photos: even Original removes the camera details, so keep the original files if you need the date and place a photo was taken.

Limits and cautions

• You can add up to 200 photos at a time, 50 MB per photo and 1 GB in total, and a single photo cannot exceed 100 megapixels.
• On iPhone and iPad, a canvas size limit means photos that are redrawn are reduced to within 16.77 megapixels (4,096 × 4,096). On other devices, too, any photo over 50 megapixels is reduced to within that size when it is redrawn, to protect memory, so a larger PNG, GIF or BMP is not lossless even at Original. A JPG that goes in with its original data is never reduced, whatever its size.
• There is no tool here to crop a photo or straighten a tilt. If you need that, fix the photo first with image crop and then add it.
• The PDF is not password-protected. To restrict opening, lock the saved PDF with PDF password protect.
• Animated GIFs, Live Photos and HDR brightness information are included only as the first frame or at normal brightness.
• This tool was tested in Chrome. The PDF size at the recompressing levels can differ slightly because each browser has its own JPG encoder.

As of The standards, browser support sources and sample figures were checked on 2026-10-21.

Sources

• 01ISO 32000-1:2008 Document management — Portable document format (Adobe public copy)7.4.8 DCTDecode (the filter that decodes JPEG baseline images), 8.9.4 image coordinates (the unit square placed on the page with the cm operator), Table 89 SMask (PDF 1.4 soft mask)
• 02CIPA DC-008-2019 Exif 2.32Orientation tag (274): definitions of 1, 3, 6 and 8; 6 is the arrangement of 1 turned 90 degrees clockwise
• 03ISO 216:2007 Writing paper and certain classes of printed matter — Trimmed sizesThe standard for the A series of paper sizes (A4 is 210 × 297 mm)
• 04Can I use — HEIF/HEIC image formatSupported from Safari and iOS Safari 17; not supported in Chrome, Edge or Firefox
• 05MDN — createImageBitmap()The default imageOrientation, from-image, follows the EXIF orientation. Used to shrink and redraw photos
• 06libheif (strukturag)The HEIC and HEIF decoding library (LGPL-3.0). This tool uses libheif-js 1.23.5

Frequently asked questions

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