How to Convert JPG or PNG Images to One PDF
By the Datatool360 team ·
You photographed a few pages with your phone, or you have screenshots and ID photos, and the form wants one PDF. You do not need a special app for this. Here is how to turn a pile of pictures into one tidy PDF, in the right order, and how to keep it small enough to upload.
Convert images to a PDF step by step
- Open the Merge PDF tool. It handles images as well as PDFs.
- Add your pictures: select them all at once or drag them in. JPG, PNG, WebP and similar formats work. Each picture becomes one page.
- Drag the pictures up or down into the right order. Phone photos are often named by time, but not always in the order you took them, so look at the list.
- Press Merge PDFs. The new PDF is saved to your computer.
Everything runs in your browser, so photos of ID cards or bills are not uploaded anywhere.
How the pictures are placed on the pages
Each picture becomes a page that fits the picture, shown at its own size up to the size of an A4 page. A very large photo is scaled down so that its long side is no longer than that of an A4 page, and a small one stays small. This means a tall photo makes a tall page and a wide screenshot a wide page, so you do not get cut-off edges or big white margins around everything.
If a form wants every page to be the same size, take your photos in the same way, for example always upright, or crop them to the same shape before you merge.
Getting a good photo of a document
The PDF is only as good as the pictures. A few habits help a lot. Put the paper on a plain, flat surface. Use daylight or a bright lamp, and avoid your own shadow. Hold the phone straight above the page, not at an angle. Fill the frame with the page. Check that the text can be read when you zoom in, before you go on to the next page.
If a photo has a lot of empty background, you can later trim the edges of the PDF with the Crop PDF tool.
Mixing images and PDFs
You can put photos and PDFs in the same list. For example: the first page of an application as a PDF, then photos of your certificates, then another PDF. If you only need a few pages from a PDF in the list, type a page range in its Pages box. Page Mode lets you move single pages around, also between files, and remove pages you do not want.
Keeping the file small
Phone photos are big, often several megabytes each, so a PDF made from ten of them can be too large to send. After merging, run the result through Compress PDF. Photos are exactly the kind of content that shrinks well. If the form has a limit, type it into the Target size box.
Compress after you have checked the order, not before. It is easier to fix the order in the merged file than to redo everything.
Good to know
- The text in a photo is a picture of text. The PDF will look fine, but you cannot select or search the words. To get the text out, use PDF to Text, which reads pictures with OCR.
- Pictures with a transparent background (some PNG files) are shown on a white page.
- If the tool is slow with a lot of big pictures, merge them in two rounds.
Keep reading
- How to Merge PDF Files and Images Into One PDFCombine several PDFs and images into one file: pick only some pages, put them in the order you want, and what to do about password protected files.
- How to Compress a PDF to a Specific Size (200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB)How to get a PDF under a size limit such as 200 KB or 1 MB: type the target size, what the tool does to reach it, and what to do when the limit is too small.