JPG to PDF

Add the photographs, drag them into the order you want, and download a single document with one image per page.

The two things that go wrong are the order and the size, and both are worth a moment before you download rather than after you've sent it.

Why the file is enormous

The pictures are the file. Twenty phone photos make a PDF roughly the size of twenty phone photos, which is commonly 60MB and too large to email.

Resizing them first is the fix, and it costs nothing you can see. A photo 4000 pixels wide printed on A4 shows no more detail than the same photo at 2000, because paper can't resolve it. Halving the dimensions quarters the file.

Doing it in that order matters. Shrinking images before they go in beats compressing the finished PDF, because compressing afterwards works on images that are already embedded.

Why photos come out sideways

A phone doesn't rotate a photo when you turn the camera. It records the pixels as the sensor saw them and adds a note saying which way up to display it.

Most viewers read that note. Some don't. So a photo that's upright in your gallery can land sideways in a document, and both are showing the same file correctly by their own rules.

The rotation is applied here before the page is made, so what you see is what you get. A picture that's still wrong has a wrong note, which happens to images that have been through several apps, and rotating and re-saving in any editor fixes it for good.

Page size, and why it matters for printing

Fitting each page to its image means no margins and no cropping, and a document whose pages are all different sizes. That's fine on screen and awkward on paper.

Fitting to a fixed page, A4 or Letter, prints predictably and puts white space around anything whose proportions don't match.

If the document is going to be printed, submitted to a portal, or attached to an application, use a fixed size. Plenty of upload systems reject documents with inconsistent page dimensions, and printers scale unpredictably.

Photographing documents

If you're using a phone rather than a scanner, three things matter more than resolution.

Fill the frame with the page and shoot straight down. Perspective is much harder to correct afterwards than to avoid.

Use even light. A shadow across the page or a bright reflection costs more legibility than any camera setting gains.

Shoot in colour even for black and white documents. A phone's black and white mode makes decisions you can't undo, and converting later keeps the option.

Checking before you send

Look at the first page and the last page. Those two catch nearly every ordering mistake, because a reversed or offset sequence shows immediately at the ends.

Then check the size. If it's over about 10MB and it's going by email, resize and rebuild rather than hoping.

If you need it searchable

A PDF of photographs is pictures of words, not words. Nothing can search it, and pasting from it isn't possible.

Making it searchable needs recognition, which reads the text out of the images. That's a separate step and worth doing for anything you'll need to find again.

Everything happens in your browser. The photographs aren't uploaded, which matters given this is the tool people reach for with passports, contracts and receipts.