Image to PDF

Building the file

1. Add images swallows a whole batch in one go, and on a phone Take photo shoots a receipt straight into the list. Come back for more later and they join the end.
2. Drag the rows by their grips until the order reads right, or focus a grip and press the arrow keys. Remove drops a stray.
3. Choose page size, orientation, margins, fit, layout and quality, watch the document above rebuild with its page count and size, then press Download PDF.

About this tool

Image to PDF is the fix for the email that would otherwise go out with eleven attachments hanging off it. Add the pictures, or shoot them there and then with Take photo, and each one lands as a page of its own. The list that appears is the page order, each row with a thumbnail and the page it lands on: drag a row by its grip, or focus the grip and nudge it with the arrow keys. The document itself is built as you go and shown page by page above the list, so you read the real PDF before anything is saved.

Page size is A4 at 595.28 by 841.89 points, US Letter, or Fit to image, where the page gets cut to whatever the picture measures. Orientation either follows each image's shape or stays pinned portrait or landscape. Fit drops the whole picture on the page and leaves the leftover as white. Fill page scales it up until it covers everything, then trims what hangs past the edge, which is the borderless look photos usually want. Margins come as None, Snug, Standard and Wide presets (0, 12, 24 and 48 points) over four boxes you can still edit, up to 200 a side, and they start at Standard.

Image quality is where the file size gets decided. Original embeds a JPG or PNG as it is while Fit is chosen; under Fill each picture is cropped and written again as PNG, which can make a camera photo several times larger than the JPEG it came from. High, Medium and Small re-encode through JPEG at 0.85, 0.7 and 0.5, and Medium is the one that usually takes a folder of phone shots from tens of megabytes down to something sendable. An Add page numbers checkbox sits under the settings with five formats to pick from, a bare 1, Page 1, 1 of N, 1 / N or roman numerals, and nine positions around the page. Layout can stay at one picture per page or switch to Continuous, which stacks wide pictures down the page and turns six screenshots into three pages. The download borrows its name from the first image in the list, so IMG_2043.jpg comes back as IMG_2043.pdf, and it only happens when you press Download PDF.

Good to know

• Nothing here rotates a picture. One that went in sideways comes out sideways, and Fill page crops to the shape of the page without ever turning anything. Straighten it before you add it.
• Pictures never sit side by side. Continuous stacks them down the page, but a contact sheet of twelve thumbnails is still a job for an image editor.
• Any quality other than Original re-encodes through JPEG onto a white backdrop, so a PNG with a transparent background comes out with white behind it. Stay on Original when the transparency matters.
• Fill page has no effect when the page size is Fit to image, because the page was already cut to the picture. Both settings are asking for the same thing.
• The document is assembled in memory and the preview rebuilds roughly a third of a second after every change you make, so a hundred 12-megapixel scans is where a phone gives up.