How to convert iPhone photos to a PDF

iPhones make great pocket scanners — receipts, whiteboards, signed documents, anything paper. Turning a batch of those photos into a single PDF is the natural next step for filing, sharing, or sending. Here is how to do it in your browser, without uploading photos to a third-party service.

The 60-second flow

1. On your phone: open Photos, select the images you want, tap Share, choose a way to get them to your computer — AirDrop is fastest, iCloud Drive works too, and emailing them to yourself is fine in a pinch.
2. On your computer: open the JPG to PDF tool.
3. Drop the photos on the upload area. They appear in a reorderable list.
4. Drag to reorder — top of the list becomes page 1.
5. Pick a page size: Letter for US, A4 for everywhere else, Fit-to-image to skip page sizing entirely and let each photo be its own page size.
6. Click Convert to PDF and download.

If you would rather stay on the phone: the tool works in mobile Safari. Tap the upload area and pick from Photos directly. The PDF saves to Files or the Photos app when you tap Share.

HEIC vs JPG

Modern iPhones save in HEIC format by default. Most browsers and PDF tools cannot read HEIC directly. Two ways around it:

• Use the Share sheet — when you share photos from Photos to anywhere outside the Apple ecosystem (email, AirDrop to a PC, “Copy” then paste into a chat), iOS automatically converts HEIC to JPG. So as long as the photos arrive on your computer as .jpg, you are fine.
• Change Camera settings — Settings → Camera → Formats → “Most Compatible”. From then on the camera saves JPG natively. You lose a bit of compression efficiency but gain wider compatibility.

Tips for receipt and document photos

• Use Notes or Files app’s built-in scanner first. Both iOS Notes and Files have a “Scan Documents” option that auto-crops and squares perspective. The output is JPG-friendly and looks more like a scan than a photo.
• Good lighting beats good post-processing. A clean photo on a contrasting surface produces a tidier PDF than any post-conversion cleanup.
• One photo per page is the default. If you want a multi-image page, combine the images in Photos first (or use the Merge PDF tool on per-image PDFs).

Privacy

iPhone photos often contain location metadata (EXIF), and you probably do not want to upload a stack of those to an unknown server. The conversion happens in your browser via pdf-lib — your photos stay on your device. EXIF data is also stripped during the conversion (PDF does not preserve EXIF), so the resulting PDF does not carry location data either.