How to combine photos into one PDF for school or work

Assignment portals, job application forms, expense systems and government upload pages tend to accept exactly one file, and that file usually has to be a PDF. If you have photographed six pages of a document with your phone, you need them combined and in the right order.

How to do it

1. Open the image to PDF tool.
2. Select all your photos at once. The order you add them is the order of the pages, so name them 01, 02, 03 and so on beforehand if you want to be certain.
3. Convert. Every image becomes one page, sized to the image.
4. Download the single PDF.

Photographing documents so they are readable

• Shoot straight down, not at an angle. Skewed pages are hard to read and look careless.
• Use daylight from a window rather than a ceiling light directly overhead, which casts a shadow of your own phone.
• Fill the frame with the page. Cropping later costs resolution.
• Check that the smallest text is legible before you leave the desk. Retaking one photo is easier than redoing the whole set.

Keeping the PDF small enough to upload

Phone photos are typically 3 to 8 MB each, so ten pages can produce a 50 MB PDF that the portal rejects. Reduce the scale to 50 percent before converting, or compress the JPGs first at 70 percent quality. Text remains perfectly readable and the PDF usually drops under 5 MB.

Going the other way

If you received a PDF and need the pages as images, for example to paste into a document or a slide, the reverse conversion produces one high resolution JPG per page and hands them back as a ZIP.