JPG to PDF converter

What happens to your photos

By default, a JPG or PNG goes into the PDF byte for byte, exactly as it is. Nothing is compressed again, so the photo keeps all its quality, and the PDF is about the size of the pictures together. We put six camera photos, 51.8 MB in all, into one PDF: it came out 4 KB larger than the photos.

Other formats are converted on the way in. HEIC, WebP, AVIF, GIF and BMP pictures become JPG at 85 percent quality, transparent areas included, which turn white. A JPG that only looks upright because of a rotation tag in its data is redrawn the right way up, so it never lands sideways in the PDF.

Making the PDF smaller

Phone photos are much larger than a page needs. Switch off Keep JPG and PNG as they are and two more settings appear: the longest side of each picture, and the JPEG quality. With the same six photos:

On an A4 page with the default margins, the long side of a photo is printed 25 to 28 centimetres long. At 2000 pixels that is about 180 to 200 pixels per inch, which looks sharp on screen and on an office printer; 1400 pixels gives about 130 to 140. Keep the photos as they are only for professional printing or when every detail matters. A PDF you already have can be shrunk the same way with compress PDF.

Page size, orientation and fit

• Page size. A4 is the standard almost everywhere, US Letter in the United States and Canada. Same as each image makes every page exactly the size of its picture, with no margin, which suits slides and screenshots.
• Orientation. Auto puts landscape photos on landscape pages and portrait photos on portrait pages, so each fills as much of its page as possible.
• Margin. From 0 to 40 mm of white around each picture. 10 mm keeps photos clear of the edge that many printers cannot reach.
• Fit shows the whole picture with white space where the shapes differ. Fill covers the page and crops the overflow from the centre. Stretch fills the page by distorting the picture, which is rarely what you want.

Order, and one file per picture

Pages follow the order of the list: drag rows to change it. You can also paste pictures straight from the clipboard. To send each picture as its own PDF, switch on One PDF per image; the files arrive together in one ZIP. To join the result with other PDFs, use merge PDF.

If something goes wrong

• The PDF is too big to email. Switch off keeping the originals and choose 2000 or 1400 pixels.
• A photo is cropped. Fill is selected; switch to Fit to see the whole picture.
• A scan looks grey or faint. The PDF shows the picture exactly as it is. Brighten it before converting, or scan again with more light.

How we tested. Six CC0 camera photos between 1.9 and 22.8 MB, placed on A4 pages with 10 mm margins by the code of this tool in Chrome, once as they are and once resized and saved again at quality 85.