Convert JPG and PNG images to PDF

The scanner most people already own

A phone camera is a perfectly good document scanner, and for most purposes — a signed form, a utility bill, a certificate, a receipt — the resulting PDF is indistinguishable from one made on a flatbed. What separates a usable result from a rejected one is not the hardware but three small habits.

Light the page evenly. The classic failure is standing between a ceiling light and the document, so your own shadow falls across it. Move to a window, or turn so the light comes over your shoulder from the side. Daylight is better than any lamp.

Shoot square on. Hold the phone parallel to the page rather than leaning over it. A page photographed at an angle comes out as a trapezium, and while the text may be legible, it reads as careless — which matters when the document is an application.

Fill the frame. Get close enough that the page occupies most of the picture. Cropping afterwards throws away resolution you paid for in file size, and a page floating in the middle of a photo of your desk is a poor first impression.

Choosing the page size properly

This is the setting that most affects whether your PDF is accepted. Fit to image produces pages shaped exactly like your photographs. Nothing is cropped or padded, and if you mix portrait and landscape shots each keeps its natural shape. It is the right choice for anything that will be read on a screen.

A4 or Letter places each image, scaled to fit, on a standard sheet with a margin. Use it whenever the document might be printed, and always when a form asks for a specific page size — some government and university portals genuinely validate this and reject files whose pages are 3024 × 4032 points because that is what the camera produced. A4 is standard almost everywhere; Letter is the norm in the United States and Canada.

The margin control matters more than it looks. Home and office printers cannot print to the very edge of a sheet, so an image placed edge-to-edge will be clipped when printed. A margin of around 24 points — a third of an inch — is safe on essentially any printer.

Order first, then everything else

Get the sequence right before you convert. The arrows beside each file set the page order, and the numbered badge shows the position each image will take. This is worth a moment's attention because file browsers sort alphabetically, which puts IMG_10 directly after IMG_1, and a ten-page document in the wrong order is more annoying to fix than to get right.

Once you have the PDF, the usual follow-ups are rotating any page the camera recorded sideways, merging it with a covering letter, and compressing the result to meet an upload limit. Compress last — it is the only step whose right setting depends on the finished document.