Build a PDF from photos or images

Why several images become a "single file" problem

A lot of places that accept a file upload ask for exactly one: an attachment field that doesn't allow multiple selection, a form with a single upload slot, an email where attaching five separate photos gets messy fast. When what you actually have is a set of images — a batch of photos to submit as one document, pages of something photographed with a phone, a set of images that only really makes sense filed together — the most direct fix is to combine everything into a single file before sending it, and PDF is the format almost any system accepts for that.

Doing that combination usually means opening a full PDF editor or installing an app just for this one task. This tool does only that part: it takes the images, lets you decide the order and a few page options, and hands back a finished PDF — nothing to install, and no account or sign-up of any kind required before you can use it.

How the PDF gets built

Each uploaded image becomes one page of the final document, in the order it appears in the list. The whole process happens in your browser, using a library (pdf-lib) that assembles the PDF from the already-processed images: every image is first re-encoded as JPG — even ones that were already JPG — because that's what lets the chosen compression quality control the final document size predictably, regardless of each image's original format.

Pages are assembled one at a time, with a progress bar showing which page is currently being built and a button to cancel. If a specific image can't be processed, it's flagged in the result and the rest continue normally — the final PDF comes out missing just that one page, instead of failing outright.

Page order

Page order is this tool's most important control, since it's what separates an organized document from a pile of loose images. Every uploaded image shows up as a numbered thumbnail, and its position can be adjusted two ways: dragging the thumbnail to where you want it, or using the up/down buttons on each one. The buttons exist because dragging alone isn't reliable — it doesn't work from a keyboard, and it tends to be imprecise on a phone screen. You can also remove an image from the list without affecting the order of the rest.

Page size, orientation, and margin

Three options control how each page looks. Size can be A4, Letter, or "fit to image" — in that last case, each page is sized to match its own image instead of a standard paper size. Orientation can be automatic (decided by each image's aspect ratio, portrait or landscape), or locked to portrait or landscape for the whole document. Margin ranges from none to medium; in every combination, the image is always fit entirely inside the page, never cropped or stretched — if the image's proportions don't exactly match the page's, empty space is left around it, centered.

Quality and final file size

The quality control (1 to 100, default 85) directly affects how much each image weighs inside the PDF — higher values keep more detail and produce a larger file, lower values compress more. But the factor that usually matters most for final size is the resolution of the source images: very large photos, even at reduced quality, still produce a heavy PDF. If the result is bigger than expected, it's worth shrinking each image first with this site's reduce-image-size tool, and only then assembling the PDF.

What this tool doesn't do

It doesn't recognize the text that appears inside the images: the generated PDF has each page as an image, not as selectable or searchable text — even if the image is a photo of a page full of text. It also doesn't edit a PDF that already exists: it only creates a new document from images. And it doesn't compress or shrink an existing PDF — if that's your actual problem, this tool simply isn't the right one for it. In both of those cases, look for a tool built specifically for that job instead of trying to force this one to do something it was never designed for.