Turn photos into one PDF

Because one file arrives in one piece, in the order you meant.

Fifteen photos attached to an email arrive sorted by filename, which is almost never the order they should be read in. They open one at a time, in whatever the recipient’s machine uses for images, and there is nothing holding them together as a single document.

A PDF fixes the order, opens the same way everywhere, prints as a set, and can be signed or annotated. For an expense claim or a set of scanned pages, that difference is the whole job.

The image is placed at its original resolution. Nothing is recompressed.

That means a PDF made from phone photos is roughly the size of those photos added together, which can be large. A page of A4 text photographed at twelve megapixels is far more detail than anyone needs to read it.

If size matters, reduce the images before converting rather than after. Compressing a PDF full of photographs is a lossy operation on data that has already been through one, and the result is usually worse than starting from smaller images.

Each image gets a page shaped to fit it, scaled to a standard page size.

The alternative, forcing every image onto A4, leaves white bars beside anything that is not exactly A4 proportioned, which is nearly everything a phone produces. Fitting the page to the image looks correct on screen.

For a document that will be printed, a consistent page size matters more than a snug fit, since a printer works to physical paper. Mixed page sizes print correctly but need the printer set to scale.

The order you arrange them in, which is rarely the order they arrive in.

Files added from a folder come in sorted by name, and names sort as text rather than numbers: IMG_1, IMG_10, IMG_2. Phone cameras and scanners produce exactly those names, which is why the problem shows up on photos more than anything else.

Photos taken in sequence usually do sort correctly, since the numbers keep the same width. It is the mixed sets, some from a camera, some downloaded, some renamed, that scramble.

Rather than trusting it, look at the thumbnails and drag anything out of place. It takes a few seconds and it is the only way to be sure, particularly for something like an expense claim where the order carries meaning.

For most purposes, close enough. For text you need to search, no.

A photograph of a page is an image. The words in it are not text as far as any software is concerned, you cannot select them, search them, or copy them. A scanner produces the same thing unless it runs OCR.

So a photographed contract is fine to send, sign and file, and useless if you later need to find the clause about payment terms by searching. If that matters, you need OCR, which we do not do.