Convert JPG to PDF, one picture or 200 in one file

How to convert a picture to PDF

To convert a JPG or any other picture to PDF, select your pictures, put them in order, pick a Page size and press Make PDF. In full:

1. Press Select images and pick your pictures, or drop them anywhere on the page. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO, SVG and iPhone HEIC files all open.
2. Put them in order. Drag the cards in the strip under the stage, or select a card and press Alt with the left or right arrow. The number on each card is its page.
3. Pick a Page size: A4, US Letter or Fit to picture.
4. For A4 and US Letter, set the Orientation and the Margin.
5. Press Make PDF. When the screen says Your PDF is ready, press Save PDF.

The stage shows the page of the card you have selected, with the picture where the PDF will put it, and a chip such as Page 2 of 5. The panel counts the pages and gives the page size in millimetres, so you can check everything before you make the file.

Need more pictures? Add pictures on the work screen puts them at the end of the strip. To drop one, use the cross on its card. The PDF is named after the first picture: receipt-01.pdf for one picture, receipt-01_and_11_more.pdf for twelve.

PDF page size, orientation and margin

The PDF page size decides how the file prints and how it looks on screen. Every page uses the same setting.

• Orientation: Auto gives a wide picture a landscape page and a tall one a portrait page. Portrait or Landscape sets every page the same way.
• Margin: 0 to 30 mm of white around the picture, 10 mm by default. The picture is scaled to fit inside it and centred, and it keeps its shape.
• Fit to picture makes each page the size of its picture at the picture's own resolution, or at 96 pixels per inch when the file does not say. Orientation and Margin are not needed, so they are hidden.

So a scan of 2400 × 3000 pixels saved at 300 pixels per inch gives an 8 × 10 inch page with Fit to picture. On A4 the same scan is scaled to fit inside the margin, so it prints on a standard sheet.

How each picture goes into the PDF

With Keep JPGs exactly as they are switched on, which is the default, a JPG goes into the PDF without being saved again: its picture data is copied byte for byte, so no quality is lost. A PNG without transparency goes in unchanged too, as when you convert PNG to PDF.

Switching it off shows Compress the pictures, with Smaller and Balanced, and every page is saved as a JPG at that quality. Use it when the PDF must be small, for example for an email limit. It helps most when the pictures are HEIC photos or screenshots, which otherwise go in as large PNGs.

Keeping a JPG as it is does not keep its details. Camera and location details stored inside it, such as the place a photo was taken, are removed on the way in, in the same way Remove EXIF data removes them: only the picture data and its colour profile go into the PDF. Other pictures go in as pixels only, so you can share photos to PDF without giving away where they were taken.

Scanned pages, receipts and photos to PDF

Most jobs that need multiple pictures in one PDF fall into a few kinds. A few tips for each:

• Scanned pages: Fit to picture keeps each scan at its real size when the scanner saved its resolution. For a document that will be printed, A4 or US Letter with a small Margin looks tidy.
• Phone photos of paper: crop each photo to the page first with Crop image, so the PDF does not show the table around it. Rotate image straightens one that came out sideways.
• Receipts: leave Orientation on Auto, so long receipts get portrait pages and wide ones landscape.
• Photos to PDF for an album or a portfolio: Fit to picture removes white edges, which reads best on a screen.
• Screenshots for a report: A4 with Landscape suits wide screens. For a saved .html page, convert HTML to PDF instead.

Each page of the PDF holds a picture, so the words on a scanned page or receipt cannot be selected or searched. To copy them into an email or a document, get the text from picture with Image to Text. It reads printed English and, unlike this page, works on our server. Then convert text to PDF for a searchable copy.

Making a PDF from slides or a Word document? Convert PowerPoint to PDF or convert Word to PDF instead: the words stay as text you can search.

Want every picture on one long page instead? Merge images joins them side by side, stacked or in a grid, into a single picture.

Merge many pictures into one PDF, privately

One PDF for all, the default, is how you merge JPG to PDF: many pictures, one file, one picture per page, however many pages that takes. It works the same when you convert images to PDF in a mix of formats, such as PNG screenshots and HEIC photos. If you want the opposite, a separate PDF for each picture, choose One PDF per picture at the top of the panel: each picture becomes its own one-page PDF, with the same page settings.

• Nothing is uploaded. The PDF is built in your browser, and our server does no picture work.
• The PDF's own details say it was made by Whatafile; nothing about you or your files is written into them.
• It is free, with no account and no watermark on the pages. Image tools are not counted in the free daily limit, which applies to document conversions only.
• It works in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Very large pictures may be too big for your browser.