You photographed six pages of a signed form, or a stack of receipts, or a handful of screenshots you need to send. Individually they are awkward: your email has six attachments, they arrive out of order, and half of them are turned sideways. A single PDF fixes all of that. It travels as one file, it holds its page order, and it opens identically whether the recipient is on a phone, a laptop, or a printer. Here is how to build one that looks deliberate rather than thrown together, and small enough to actually send.
Two ways in: existing photos or the camera
If the images already live on your device, the Images to PDF tool is the direct route. Add your JPGs or PNGs, arrange them, and export one PDF. It is worth thinking about order at this stage rather than after, because the sequence you add them in becomes the page order of the finished document. This is the tool to use for screenshots of a conversation, photos you took earlier and forgot about, or a set of images someone sent you that you now need to hand on as a single file. Mixing portrait and landscape images in one document is fine; each page simply takes the shape of its image.
If you are capturing something now, such as a paper form or a receipt, the Scan to PDF tool uses your device camera as a scanner. It is built for capturing pages one after another and assembling them straight into a PDF, which is tidier than shooting loose photos into your camera roll and importing them later. Because it is designed for documents, it keeps the pages together as you go, so a multi-page form does not scatter across your photo library. Use it for anything paper; use Images to PDF for screenshots and pictures you already have on hand.
Capture well, then straighten and trim
A good PDF starts with a decent photo, so a little care when you shoot saves a lot of fixing afterward. Even careful photos usually include some tabletop, a bit of a shadow, or a page that sits slightly crooked. After capturing, the Crop tool lets you trim each page down to just the content, cutting away distracting borders, shadows, and crooked edges and giving every page a consistent frame. Go through the pages and crop each one so the document reads as a clean set rather than a series of snapshots. Cropping tightly also removes pixels you do not need, which helps keep the final file size down before you even reach the compression step.
- Light it evenly. Shade or soft indoor light beats direct glare, which washes out text and casts hard shadows.
- Shoot straight down, not at an angle, so the page edges stay rectangular rather than trapezoidal.
- Fill the frame with the page and leave a small margin, so you capture detail without wasting resolution on the table around it.
- Hold steady and tap to focus before you shoot; a sharp photo of text is worth two blurry ones.
Compress before you share
Phone photos are large. Ten full-resolution images can easily add up to a file too big for some email limits, and there is rarely a reason to send that much detail for a receipt or a form. The Compress tool shrinks the PDF by reducing the weight of the images inside it. For most sharing, a compressed file is indistinguishable from the original on screen but a fraction of the size, which means it uploads faster, attaches without complaint, and takes up less room wherever the recipient files it. If the document needs to be printed at high quality, compress gently or keep the original; if it just needs to be read on a screen, compress freely and enjoy the smaller file.
Putting it together
- Capture each page with Scan to PDF, or gather your existing images for Images to PDF.
- Arrange the pages in the order you want them read before exporting.
- Crop each page to trim away background, shadows, and crooked edges.
- Export to a single PDF and open it once to confirm the order and orientation.
- Run Compress so the file is comfortably small enough to email or upload.
One habit worth building: open the finished PDF and read through it before you send it. Check that every page is right-side up, in order, and legible. It takes thirty seconds and catches the sideways page or the duplicate you would otherwise only discover after the recipient replied to ask about it. Everything here runs in your browser, so the photos of your receipts and signed forms are never uploaded to us; they stay on your device from capture to final file, and the workflow quickly becomes your default for anything paper in your life.