What this does
Collects JPG photos into one PDF, a page per photo, in whatever order you
drag them into, and downloads it as images.pdf. It is built
for the everyday case where a phone camera has stood in for a scanner: a
stack of receipts for an expense claim, the pages of a signed lease, a
passport and a utility bill for a verification form. One file opens in
order on any device where eight loose photos would not. The PDF is assembled by pdf-lib in your browser and the photos are never
uploaded.
How do I combine JPGs into a PDF?
- Select the photos. The picker filters to
.jpgand.jpeg; open it again to add more, up to 20. - Drag rows to set the page order. Check the two-digit index before you build.
- Pick a page size and press Create PDF.
Which page size is right for receipts and scanned pages?
A4 or US Letter, almost always. Each photo is scaled to fit inside a 24-point margin, centred, and the sheet is turned to landscape automatically when the photo is wider than it is tall. The result prints on ordinary paper without cropping, and a portrait shot of a receipt sits on a portrait page like a real scan. Fit each image makes the page exactly the photo's pixel size at one point per pixel, so a 12-megapixel photo becomes a 56-inch page. Viewers cope; printers do not.
Will my photos lose quality?
Marginally. Each JPG is decoded, drawn onto a white canvas and re-encoded as JPEG at quality 0.92 before it is embedded, which is a second generation of lossy compression. On a photograph the difference is invisible at any normal size; you would need to compare pixels side by side. Photos wider or taller than 8192 px are reduced to that limit. The browser honours the orientation flag a phone writes into a photo, so shots taken with the phone rotated come out the right way up rather than on their side.
Does the PDF keep the photo's location and camera data?
No, and for documents that is usually a relief. Re-encoding through the canvas produces a fresh JPEG with no EXIF block, so GPS coordinates, the time of capture and the phone model do not travel with the PDF. The EXIF viewer shows what a photo carries before you share it. The PDF's own metadata holds no title or author, only a producer stamp from the PDF library.
Can I search the text in a photographed document?
No. The tool does no OCR, so a photo of a contract stays a photo: it can be read, zoomed and printed, but not searched or copied from. That is fine for proof-of-address uploads and expense claims. If someone needs to work with the words, keep the original digital document or OCR the images first.
How many photos can I include, and how big will the PDF be?
Twenty per PDF, each up to 50 MB. The output is roughly the sum of the re-encoded photos, so twenty full-resolution phone pictures give a PDF of tens of megabytes. If a portal limits upload size, run the photos through the image resizer or image compressor before building the PDF; the PDF compressor does not touch image data. For more than twenty pages, make two PDFs and join them with the PDF merger.