How to turn photos into a single PDF

Take a good photo of the document

• Lay the document flat on a dark, plain surface: the edges stand out better.
• Hold the phone directly above it, parallel to the page, to avoid a skewed perspective.
• Avoid the flash, which creates glare, and use daylight when you can.
• Frame the page as closely as possible without cutting off the edges.

Option 1: a scanner look with Scan to PDF

The “Scan to PDF” tool is made for photos of documents. It cleans up the image to get a result close to a real scanner.

1. Open “Scan to PDF” and select your photos. On a phone, you can also take the photos directly.
2. Choose the look: “Document” for a white background and crisp black text, “Grayscale” for mixed documents, or “Color”.
3. Put the pages back in order with the arrows, then click “Create PDF” and download the result.

Option 2: keep the photos as they are with JPG to PDF

For photos, screenshots or images that are already clean, the “JPG to PDF” tool places them on A4 or US Letter pages, or pages sized to the image, with or without margins. Each image becomes a page, and photos taken in landscape are automatically placed in landscape orientation.

Shrink the PDF before sending it

Phone photos are large: a PDF of just a few pages can easily exceed 10 MB. Run the result through “Compress PDF” before emailing it or uploading it to a site that limits file size.

Make the text selectable

A PDF made from photos contains only images: you can’t search or copy its text. The “OCR PDF” tool recognizes the text right on your device and makes it selectable, while keeping the document’s appearance.