How to combine phone photos or receipts into one PDF
Expense reports, insurance claims, and applications often want a single file, and what you have is a camera roll. Here is how to turn a handful of photos into a single PDF that opens the right way up, and where the free tool runs out.
Last checked 2026-10-14.
Start with the right file type
Our image to PDF tool turns JPG, PNG, and WebP images into PDF pages. It does not list HEIC, the format an iPhone uses by default, so photos taken with default settings need converting first. HEIC to JPG does that in your browser, and our guide to it covers the iPhone setting that avoids the problem for future photos.
If what you already have is several PDFs rather than photos, you want Merge PDF instead.
Put the photos in the order you want the pages
Pages follow the order you add the photos in, and the list under the drop zone shows that order before you press anything. There is no dragging. To move one, use its Remove button and add it again, which puts it at the end. Reading the list once before you press Convert saves a rebuild.
With more than one image the result is named images.pdf, so rename it before you send it. A single image keeps its own name with .pdf on the end.
Choose a page size
- Same as each image is the default. Every page is exactly the shape and size of its photo, with nothing cropped or padded. If your photos differ in shape, so will your pages.
- Letter or A4 puts every photo on a standard page, centered and scaled to fit inside a half-inch margin. The whole photo is always shown, so a landscape photo on a portrait page gets white space above and below. Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches, the usual size in the United States. A4 is the standard in much of the rest of the world.
Use Letter or A4 for anything that will be printed, or filed with a form that expects ordinary pages. Use the default when the PDF will only ever be looked at on a screen.
Why phone photos come out sideways, and what we do about it
A phone usually saves a photo in the sensor's own landscape layout, together with a small note called the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) Orientation tag that says which way to turn it for display. A viewer that follows the note shows the photo upright. A program that copies the file's raw bytes into a PDF ignores the note, and every portrait photo lands on its page on its side.
That is what this tool did at first. It now reads the Orientation tag from each JPEG, and when the tag says the picture needs turning, it redraws the photo upright before placing it. A photo that is already upright goes into the PDF as it is. Our test photo is stored 120 pixels wide and 60 tall with a note to turn it a quarter turn, and it comes out as a 60 by 120 portrait page.
Redrawing has a price. A photo that needed turning is saved again as a JPEG at quality 92 out of 100, so it loses a little fidelity that the untouched ones do not.
The tool reads that one note and nothing else, and only from JPEG files. If a photo is sideways for some other reason, such as a file edited elsewhere that lost its note, the tool has no way to know, and there is no rotate button here. Turning a page of a PDF that is already built is not something this site does either. Fix the photo in your photo app and build the PDF again, or on a Mac open the PDF in Preview and rotate the page there, which Apple's guide to rotating a PDF describes.
Keep the file size down
An upright JPEG goes into the PDF untouched, so the PDF comes out about as big as the photos put together: three 4 MB photos make a PDF of roughly 12 MB. WebP images are redrawn as PNG first, which can make them larger than the WebP you started with.
A big PDF is a problem for email, and our guide to getting a PDF under an email limit covers that. One detail matters here, though. The free compressor takes files up to 10 MB, so a PDF that has already grown past that cannot be fed back into it. Shrink the photos before you build the PDF instead, with Image Resize and Compress, which shows the size before and after, for the first photo when you do several at once. It starts at a maximum width of 1,600 pixels and quality 82, so check that your receipts are still easy to read at whatever setting you choose.
More than three photos
The free plan takes up to 3 files at a time, 10 MB each. For a longer pile, build the PDF in groups of up to three photos and then join the groups with Merge PDF, which also takes up to 3 files at a time. Each run counts toward the daily limit shown under the tool. It works, and it is fiddly, so for a long stack of receipts it is the wrong choice.
When to use something else
- A long stack of receipts or paper pages. A scanning app is built for this. Apple's guide to scanning in Notes says you can scan page after page on an iPhone, and that the document is saved as a PDF in the note.
- You need the text to be searchable. A PDF built from photos holds pictures and nothing else. You cannot search it or copy a figure out of it, and this tool does not read the text in a photo.
- You need to delete or reorder pages afterward. Rebuild with the right order, or use a PDF reader's page tools. Apple's guide to Preview says it can delete pages and drag them into a new order.
- A photo needs cropping. There is no cropping here. Crop it in your photo app first.
Questions people ask
Can I put iPhone photos straight in?
Only if they are JPG. Photos saved as HEIC need converting first, and the HEIC to JPG tool on this site does that in your browser.
Why are some pages bigger than others?
With the default page size, each page matches its photo. Choose Letter or A4 to make every page the same size.
Will my photos be cropped?
No. On Letter or A4 the whole photo is scaled to fit inside the margin, and on the default size the page takes the photo's own shape.
Why is my PDF so large?
A PDF made from photos is about as big as the photos together. Shrink the photos before you build the PDF, or see the guide to making a PDF small enough to email.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The PDF is built inside your browser tab, and the page is only allowed to talk to its own site. You may see one small request to upfrontpdf.com that counts the visit, and it carries no part of your photos.
How many photos can I combine?
The free plan takes up to 3 files at a time, 10 MB each. Combining more than that takes more than one run, as described above.
Try it
The PDF is built in your browser, so your photos and receipts are never uploaded.