How to Convert a Photo to PDF on Your Phone

Photographing a document and sending the picture is fine between friends and unacceptable almost everywhere else. Landlords, employers, banks and schools all want a PDF, and a photo of a page is not one.

Convert a photo to PDF

1. 1Open the JPG to PDF tool in your phone browser.
2. 2Tap the upload area and choose the photos from your camera roll.
3. 3Order them if you have several — they become pages in that order.
4. 4Convert. The PDF saves to Files on iOS, or Downloads on Android.

Because the conversion runs in the browser, the photo never leaves your phone. Given that the photos people convert are usually passports, payslips and bank statements, that is worth caring about.

Capture it properly first

No converter can fix a bad photograph, so spend the extra ten seconds at the capture stage:

• Use your phone's document scanner rather than the plain camera — Notes on iPhone, Google Drive on Android. Both crop to the page and correct the perspective.
• Put the page on a dark surface so the edges are detected cleanly.
• Get light from the side rather than overhead, so your own shadow is not across the page.
• Hold the phone parallel to the page, not tilted over it.
• Fill the frame with the document; cropping later throws away resolution.

Several photos, one document

A three-page tenancy agreement should arrive as one three-page PDF, not three attachments. Add all the images at once and choose the single-document option; check the page order before you convert, because the phone gallery does not always hand them over in the order you took them.

Getting the size down

A modern phone camera produces 3–5 MB per photo, so a five-page document arrives at 20 MB and bounces off half the upload forms it is aimed at. Compress the finished PDF — for a photographed document the reduction is dramatic and the text stays perfectly readable.

Make it searchable

A photographed page contains no text as far as any computer is concerned. Run OCR over the finished PDF and it becomes searchable and copyable while looking identical — which is what turns a snapshot into an archive you can use.