Convert JPG to PDF

How the pages are sized

With A4 or Letter, each photo is placed on a standard page and shrunk to fit inside the margin, 24 points (8.5 mm) unless you change it, and centered; a wide photo gets a sideways page, a tall one an upright page. That is the choice for forms, printing and anything that expects paper sizes.

With Same as picture, each picture gets a page of its own shape, one point per pixel, filling it edge to edge without margins. The PDF Editor's Open a PDF or pictures… does something similar, giving each photo a page with its longer side as long as an A4 page's, 297 mm (11.7 inches):

Readers show every page at its own shape, so one PDF can mix upright and sideways photos without cutting any of them off. If a form insists on Letter or A4 sheets with white borders, choose A4 or Letter in the converter instead.

Quality and file size

A JPEG goes into the PDF as it is: the same data, not decoded and saved again. The photo in the PDF is exactly as sharp as the file you started with, and the PDF is roughly as big as the photos put together.

That cuts both ways. Ten 4 MB phone photos make a PDF of about 40 MB, which may be too much for an email or an upload form. Octoolo does not shrink photos on the way in, so make them smaller first if size matters, with the Photo Editor's image resizer or JPEG compressor, one photo at a time.

Other picture types are converted as they come in. PNG stays lossless. WebP, GIF and BMP pictures are turned into PNG first, which can make a WebP photo larger in the PDF than it was as a file, and a GIF gives only its first frame. iPhone photos in HEIC format do not open; send them from the phone as JPG, or switch the camera to its Most Compatible format.

Good uses, and a tip for documents

• Receipts and expenses photographed on a phone, sent as one file.
• ID documents and proof of address for an application, front and back as two pages.
• Handwritten notes or homework, photographed page by page.
• Before-and-after photos for an insurance claim, a deposit or a repair job.
• Pages of a paper form you filled in by hand and photographed to email back.
• A portfolio of drawings, products or rooms.

When the photo is of a document, crop it to the paper before converting, so the PDF page is the page and not the desk around it. The Photo Editor's crop does that. Mixing photos with existing PDFs? Open them all together and it becomes a merge; add page numbers if the pages will be printed.

The Windows way, and when it is enough

Windows can make a PDF from photos by printing them. Select the pictures in File Explorer, right-click and choose Print (on Windows 11, under Show more options), then pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. For a few snapshots that is fine, and it is the better fit when the PDF must be on standard paper. It places the photos on standard paper sizes using the layouts the dialog offers, and once printed, the pages cannot be sorted or added to. Octoolo keeps each photo at its own shape, lets you order and turn the pages first, and can mix in pages from other PDFs before a single save. It also leaves JPEGs untouched rather than printing them again.