A pile of photos of one document, a set of receipts, a dozen screenshots: one PDF is easier to send, print and keep than twenty separate images. Here is how to make one in the browser, and what each setting does to the pictures inside.
Steps
- Open JPG to PDF. It also takes PNG and WebP.
- Add the images and drag the thumbnails into the right order.
- Choose the page size — the same size for all pages, each page matching its image, A4, A5, Letter, Legal, a photo size or your own — and the orientation.
- Create the PDF and download it. It is built in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
What happens to the images inside
This is read from the tool's code, so it is exactly what it does:
- Small PNG pages stay lossless. A PNG page under 2 megapixels — a desktop screenshot at 1440×900 is 1.3 — goes in as PNG: text and thin lines stay as sharp as in the file.
- Larger pages and photos go in as JPEG at the quality of the chosen preset. That is what keeps twenty phone photos from becoming a PDF of a hundred megabytes.
- The presets cap the long side of each page: Compact — 1600 pixels, quality 0.72, for email and messengers; Balanced — 2400 pixels, 0.85, the default; Max quality — the image's own pixels, 0.92, for print and archive. Small images are never enlarged.
For receipts and scans that must stay readable, use Balanced or Max quality. If the PDF has to fit a mailbox limit, try Compact and check one page at 100% zoom before sending.
Useful options
- Searchable text: turn it on to recognize the text in scans and photos, so the PDF can be searched and the text copied. Recognition runs in your browser too.
- Grid: put several images on one page to save paper — handy for receipts.
- Password: protect the file before you send it.
Before you start
Photos straight from a phone are big; if you do not need them at full size, compress them first or let the Compact preset do it. And if the pictures are HEIC files from an iPhone, convert them to JPG first.