Tools › Documents › Images to PDF
Images to PDF
Photos and screenshots into a document, with the pictures going in as the bytes they arrived as. Most converters change your picture and do not mention it, this one tells you what it is about to do before you press the button.
- JPEG and PNG go in byte-for-byte; everything else is redrawn losslessly
- Making a smaller file is a choice you make, never a default
- One to nine pictures per page, any paper size, or a page cut to fit
- A panel that says what happened to each picture, before you save
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP. As many at once as you like.
iPhone HEIC photos open too, in any browser. Drag the tiles to change the order.
- Pictures
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- Resolution
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- Encoding
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- Pages
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What happens to each format
| Format | On "Original" | On "Smaller file" |
|---|---|---|
| JPG | Embedded as-is, byte for byte | Re-encoded at your quality |
| PNG | Embedded as-is, transparency kept | Re-encoded, transparency flattened to white |
| WebP | Redrawn to PNG, lossless | Re-encoded at your quality |
| GIF | Redrawn to PNG, lossless, first frame only | Re-encoded at your quality |
| BMP | Redrawn to PNG, lossless | Re-encoded at your quality |
| HEIC | Redrawn to PNG, lossless (decoded with libheif outside Safari) | Re-encoded at your quality |
PDF has carried JPEG and PNG natively for decades, which is why those two go in untouched. The rest have to be redrawn, but redrawn to PNG, which loses nothing, rather than to JPEG, which does.
The thing most converters get wrong
Putting a picture into a PDF does not require changing it. The format can hold a JPEG exactly as it came off the camera, and a PNG with its transparency intact.
A great many tools re-encode everything anyway, because one code path is easier to write than three. The result is a document whose photographs are a generation worse than the originals, with no setting that caused it and no mention that it happened. If you then delete the originals, that loss is permanent.
An earlier version of this page did exactly that to WebP, GIF and BMP files: quality 0.92, hard-coded, undisclosed. It does not any more, and the Encoding figure in the panel exists so you never have to take that on trust.
When a smaller file is the right answer
Sometimes it genuinely is. Forty photographs off a modern phone is several hundred megabytes, which is not an email attachment and not something a portal will accept.
"Smaller file" re-encodes to JPEG at a quality you pick, and can cap the long edge as well. Capping is usually the bigger win: a 4032-pixel photo printed at 10 cm wide is carrying about four times the detail the paper can show. Dropping the long edge to 1600 typically saves more than any quality setting will, and costs nothing visible.
Page size, and what fits
A fixed sheet (A4, Letter) is right when the document will be printed or filed. The picture is centred with a margin and the page is a standard size, which is what a printer, a binder and a colleague all expect.
Fit to image is right for screenshots and scans, where a standard sheet only adds white space nobody asked for. The page comes out the size of the picture, reading its pixels at 96 to the inch, the same figure a browser uses, so a 1920-pixel screenshot becomes a sensible 20-inch-wide page rather than something the size of a wall.
More than one to a page
Two, four, six or nine per sheet turns a pile of photographs into a contact sheet. Each picture keeps its own shape and is centred in its cell, so a mix of portrait and landscape does not get stretched to match.
The margin control doubles as the gap between pictures, which keeps the spacing even without a second setting that would only ever be set to the same value.
Questions
Are my photos uploaded?
No. They are read and written in this tab. There is no server, no size cap and no queue.
Does this reduce the quality of my pictures?
Not on "Original": that is the default, and the Encoding figure will say Untouched. On "Smaller file" it does, by exactly the amount you chose.
Why does it say "redrawn losslessly"?
PDF can carry JPEG and PNG directly. A WebP, GIF or BMP has to be converted to one of those first, and it is converted to PNG, which stores every pixel exactly. Nothing is lost, the file is just larger than the WebP was.
Is transparency kept?
On "Original", yes: a transparent PNG stays transparent. On "Smaller file" it cannot be: JPEG has no transparency, so anything see-through is put on white.
Can I change the order?
Drag the tiles. The order on screen is the order in the document.
What about an animated GIF?
Only the first frame. A PDF page does not animate.