Image to PDF assembles several JPEGs or PNGs into one PDF in the order you arrange them, one image per page. The assembly is done by pdf-lib inside this tab, and JPEGs are not even decoded — their original compressed data is wrapped straight into the PDF's image object, so quality is identical to the source with no second round of compression. The flip side is that the output weighs about what all your images weigh together: this is a container, not a compressor.
How to use it
- Drop images onto the dashed box, or click it and multi-select in the file picker. The label reads "Select images (multiple allowed)", and adding more later simply appends them to the end of the list.
- Choose a "Page size". "Match image size" makes each page exactly the dimensions of its image, full bleed with no margin; "A4" outputs uniform portrait A4 with the image scaled proportionally and centred. This pair of buttons only appears once you have added something.
- Check the order in the thumbnail grid. The number in the bottom-left of each tile is its page position, and the three small buttons on the right are "Move up", "Move down" and "Remove", shifting one position per click.
- Press "Create PDF". The button reads "Processing..." while it works.
- Use the "Download" link that appears to save it; the file is always called
images.pdf. Reordering, adding or removing an image, or switching the page size makes that link disappear, so build it again after any change.
When it comes in handy
Turn photographed receipts into one expense attachment
You come back from a trip with two dozen receipt photos and finance wants a single file, not two dozen attachments. Select them all, order them by date with the arrows, and export as A4 so each receipt sits centred on its own sheet, ready to print and staple. Watch out for the EXIF orientation problem described in the notes — page through the result before you send it.
Collect whiteboard or notebook photos into something browsable
Six shots of a meeting whiteboard and ten of handwritten notes vanish into the camera roll within days. Combined into a PDF they can be named, filed, and pasted straight into a ticket or an email. "Match image size" suits this better than A4, since what you want is maximum legibility rather than a printable format.
Package design exports or a portfolio
A series of PNGs out of a design application is far friendlier to a client as a PDF than as a zip — they open it and scroll. Do expect growth: PNGs are decoded and losslessly recompressed on the way into the PDF, so the result is usually noticeably larger than the stack of PNGs you started with.
Attach photos to a form that only accepts PDF
Plenty of online applications restrict attachments to PDF while what you have is a JPEG of an ID document or a site photo, and converting is the only way through. A4 is the safer choice here, because the clerk on the other end will very likely print it, whereas "Match image size" produces page dimensions dictated by pixel count and it is hard to predict how a printer will scale those.
Limits and behavior
- Only JPEG and PNG are accepted, judged by the file type the browser reports. HEIC — what an iPhone shoots by default — along with WebP, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and BMP are all refused with "Please upload a JPEG or PNG image". When you drop a batch, the unsupported ones are skipped while the valid ones still join the list, so if you see the error, count the thumbnails to confirm you got everything you expected. On an iPhone, Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible switches future photos to JPEG.
- Size checking here is looser than in the other PDF tools: the 50 MB per-image cap applies, but there is no combined-size limit and no cap on how many images you add. Fifty high-resolution photos will happily let you press the button, and every one of them is read into memory at once when the PDF is built, which stands a fair chance of taking the tab down. With large batches, build several smaller PDFs and join them with the Merge PDF tool.
- "Match image size" treats pixel count as PDF points, where one point is 1/72 inch. A 4032 × 3024 phone photo therefore produces a page of 4032 × 3024 points — roughly 56 by 42 inches. That reads perfectly well on screen, but hitting print reveals a default paper size larger than your desk. The PDF specification also caps a page edge at 14400 points, so a tall image over about fourteen thousand pixels yields an out-of-spec page that some readers will handle strangely.
- "A4" always outputs portrait 595 × 842 points with a 36-point (half-inch) margin on all four sides and the image scaled proportionally into the middle. There is no landscape A4 option and no margin control — the underlying function does accept a margin parameter, but nothing on screen is wired to it, so it stays at the default. The practical consequence is that a wide, panoramic photo occupies only a band across the middle of the sheet with large empty areas above and below.
- Scaling only ever shrinks, never enlarges. The code takes the smaller of "the ratio that fits the page" and 1, so a 300 × 300 icon lands at its original size in the centre of an A4 page surrounded by white, rather than being blown up to fill it. If you want a small image to fill the page, upscale it yourself before adding it.
- EXIF orientation is ignored, and this catches more people out than anything else here. Phone JPEGs are frequently stored in the sensor's native landscape orientation with a separate "rotate this when displaying" tag. Browsers honour that tag when drawing the thumbnail, but pdf-lib reads only width, height and channel count out of the JPEG frame header and never looks at EXIF. So the thumbnail is upright and the page in the PDF is on its side. Fix it by rotating and re-saving the photo in an image editor first, which genuinely rewrites the pixel order — or build the PDF and straighten it afterwards with the Rotate PDF tool.
- JPEGs pass through untouched: no decode, no re-encode, so there is zero quality loss and the bytes in the PDF are the bytes of your file. PNGs take a different path — they are decoded to raw pixels, recompressed losslessly into the PDF, and any transparency is stored as a separate mask. Because the compression PDF uses lacks the predictive filtering built into the PNG file format, the same image usually grows substantially on the way in, most dramatically with screenshots and other large flat-colour images.
- No colour conversion is performed. A four-channel CMYK JPEG is tagged DeviceCMYK and embedded as-is, a grayscale JPEG becomes DeviceGray, and any embedded colour profile is neither read nor applied. Ordinary phone and camera photos are three-channel RGB and unaffected, but a CMYK JPEG exported from print-oriented software can look different in the PDF than it did on your screen.
- What it does not do: compress or downscale images, run OCR, auto-crop or deskew a photographed document, place several images on one page, add page numbers or watermarks, or append images to an existing PDF — for that, build the PDF here and then use the merge tool.
Frequently asked questions
Every photo I sent over from my iPhone was rejected.
Almost certainly HEIC. iPhones have shot HEIC by default since iOS 11, the extension is .heic, and the type the browser reports is neither JPEG nor PNG, so it is turned away. Three routes out: switch Settings → Camera → Formats to "Most Compatible" so future shots are JPEG; let AirDrop convert automatically when sending to a Mac; or, simplest of all, copy the photo in the Photos app and paste it into any app that can export, which usually produces a JPEG. Sending a photo through a messaging app also converts it, at the cost of compression and visible quality loss.
The thumbnail is the right way up but the page in the PDF is sideways. Why?
An EXIF orientation mismatch. To avoid the cost of actually rotating pixels, phones often store the frame exactly as the sensor read it and add a tag saying "turn this 90 degrees when you display it". Browsers follow the tag when drawing the thumbnail, which is why it looks correct, while pdf-lib pulls only width, height and channel count from the JPEG frame header and ignores EXIF entirely, placing the original landscape pixels on the page. The permanent fix is to make the pixels themselves upright: rotate and re-save in a photo editor. If the PDF already exists, straightening the whole thing with the Rotate PDF tool works just as well.
Can I put two images on one page to save paper?
No — it is strictly one image per page, with no grid or imposition options. The faster route in practice is your print dialog's "2 pages per sheet" or "4 pages per sheet" setting, which virtually every printer driver and system print preview offers, and which handles it at print time without altering the PDF at all.
Which page size should I pick?
One question decides it: will this file be printed? For screen-only use take "Match image size" — the page equals the image exactly, nothing is letterboxed, and every page fills the view as you scroll regardless of aspect ratio. For anything that will be printed take A4, which produces a standard sheet the recipient can send to a printer without touching the scaling settings. When in doubt take A4, because the enormous pages "Match image size" can produce behave the least predictably at print time.
Will the text in the resulting PDF be searchable?
No. What goes in is imagery, and however much text is printed on those images, the PDF holds only pixels and no textual information — searching, selecting and copying are all impossible, and a screen reader gets nothing. Making a photographed document searchable requires OCR, which this site does not offer. If the content started life as a digital file such as a Word document or a web page, exporting straight to PDF from that application gives a far better and fully searchable result; do not take the detour through screenshots.
How many images can I add? I have two hundred.
No count limit is enforced and the combined size of your images is never checked — unlike Merge PDF, which guards both a 100 MB total and a 500-page ceiling, neither applies here. So two hundred will let you press the button, but every image enters memory simultaneously during generation, and on a phone or a memory-constrained machine the tab may simply die and leave you with nothing. Build them in batches of forty or fifty and join the results with Merge PDF; you also get to save as you go instead of losing everything to one failure.
Can I append images to a PDF I already have?
Not in one step, but two will do it: build the images into a PDF here and download it, then open Merge PDF, put your existing document first and the new image file second. To insert somewhere in the middle, split the original into two parts first and merge three files in the order before, images, after. Bear in mind that merging produces a new document, so bookmarks and form fields from the original are not carried over.