Turning photos and scans into one clean PDF

"Send it as one PDF" is the standard request from universities, banks, landlords and HR — and what most people have is six phone photos in their camera roll. Here's how to get from photos to a single tidy document.

The quick way

Drop all the photos into Image to PDF. Each image becomes one page, in the order you arrange them, and out comes a single PDF. That's the whole job if your photos are already straight and readable.

The scanner-style way

Phone photos of paper are usually tilted, shadowed and grey. Scan to PDF uses your camera (or your existing photos) and applies a scanner filter — auto-crop to the page edges, deskew, and contrast boost — so the result looks like it came out of a flatbed scanner rather than a kitchen table.

A few capture tips that matter more than any software:

• Fill the frame with the page; don't photograph the whole desk.
• Kill the shadow — your phone between the light and the paper is the usual culprit. Shoot from slightly to the side, or near a window.
• All pages in one session, same distance and angle, so pages look consistent.

Order, rotation, additions

Realise page 3 should be page 1? You don't need to start over: build the PDF, then reorder or add later material with Merge PDF — it accepts multiple PDFs and lets you sequence them.

The size trap

Six 12-megapixel photos make a PDF of 15–25MB, and upload forms often cap at 2–5MB. Run the result through Compress PDF — photographed pages tolerate strong compression well, because nobody needs 12MP to read A4 text.

Everything above runs in your browser: the photos — IDs, bank statements, medical documents — never upload to any server.