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August 5, 2025 · 5 min read

How to Make a PDF from Photos (Phone Scans, ID Documents, Receipts)

The right way to combine photos into a PDF for official submissions, email attachments and document archives.

You need to submit a document but all you have is a photo on your phone. Or you have ten receipts you want to file as a single PDF. Or someone emailed you a scan in the wrong format. This guide covers the fastest way to handle all of these.

The simplest path

Go to the image to PDF tool, drop your photos in, and click Create PDF. The file downloads instantly. No account, no email required.

Getting it right for official submissions

Many government portals, visa applications and bank forms specify exactly what they want. Here are the settings that work for most:

  • Page size: A4. Almost every official form expects A4. US Letter works for American submissions.
  • Orientation: Auto. This rotates each page to match the image, so a portrait photo becomes a portrait page and a landscape photo becomes a landscape page.
  • Margin: 10 mm. A small margin makes the document look intentional rather than stretched to the edges, and it avoids content being cut off if the PDF is later printed.

When the file size is too big

Some portals cap uploads at 1–2 MB. If your PDF is over the limit, the fix is to compress the source images before building the PDF. Drop each photo into the image compressor first, set quality to 70–75% and max dimension to 1920, download the compressed versions, then bring those into the PDF builder. This almost always brings multi-MB PDFs under the limit.

Ordering the pages

The PDF follows the order of the list. If you drop six images at once, they appear in the order your operating system delivered them (usually alphabetical by filename). To control the order precisely, add images one at a time, or remove and re-add any that are in the wrong position.

Multi-page documents from a phone camera

If you're photographing a multi-page document (a contract, a report), the most useful technique is to photograph every page in sequence and name the files 001, 002, 003 before you begin. That way, when you drop them all at once, they land in the right order.

Privacy

All processing happens inside your browser. Your photos are never uploaded to a server. This matters when you're scanning ID documents, medical papers or financial statements — those files stay on your device.

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