How to combine phone photos of documents into one PDF

Job portals, college admissions, bank KYC and visa forms often ask for several paper documents as one PDF: certificates, mark sheets, an ID card, a bank statement. If you don’t have a scanner, your phone camera is enough.

This guide covers photographing the pages so they are readable, and putting them in the right order and the right way up. It also covers getting the finished PDF under the portal’s size limit, which is where most people get stuck.

1. Photograph each page

• One page per photo. Lay the page flat on a dark or plain surface, so its edges stand out.
• Use daylight from a window. Avoid a single bulb overhead, which leaves a shadow of you and your phone.
• Hold the phone flat and directly above the page, so the page is a rectangle on screen rather than a slanted shape. Fill the screen with the page.
• Keep the flash off. On glossy certificates and ID cards it leaves a bright patch that hides text.
• Tap the text on the screen to focus, then zoom in on the photo to check that small print is sharp.

Your phone may also have a built-in document scanner (Google Drive on Android, or Notes and Files on iPhone) that straightens pages automatically. If it saves images, combine them as below. If it saves PDFs, put those together with Merge PDF instead.

2. Crop each photo to the page

Open each photo in your phone’s gallery, tap Edit, and crop it to the edges of the page. Cropping removes the table or floor around the page, which makes the document easier to read. It also makes the PDF smaller.

Do this before combining. Image to PDF places each photo exactly as it is; it does not crop or straighten pages for you.

3. Combine them into one PDF

1. Open Image to PDF and choose your photos. You can pick several at once and add more later; JPG, PNG and iPhone HEIC photos can be mixed.
2. Check the order. Each photo shows the page number it will become. Use the arrow buttons under a photo to move it earlier or later.
3. Turn any sideways photo upright with the rotate buttons, and remove any you don’t need.
4. Choose the page size, margins and image quality (see the table below).
5. Tap Create PDF. The download button then shows the size of the finished file. Tap it to save the PDF.

Which settings to choose

“JPEG” is the Compressed (JPEG) option with its quality slider; “PNG” is Lossless (PNG), which keeps screenshots crisp but makes much larger files from photos. Keep margins on Small for documents.

With A4 or Letter, each photo is scaled to fit the page and centred, keeping its shape. Leave orientation on Match each image, so portrait pages stay portrait and landscape ones (a wide certificate, say) get a landscape page. With Match each image as the page size, every page is exactly the size of its own photo, with no scaling or white borders.

4. Make the PDF small enough to upload

A single phone photo is often 2 to 5 MB, so a ten-page document can come to tens of megabytes. Portals usually accept a few megabytes at most, and some much less. Check the limit on the form, then compare it with the size shown on the download button.

If the PDF is too big, try these in order:

1. Lower the quality. Move the quality slider down to about 70–80% and tap Create PDF again. For photographed documents the difference is hard to see.
2. Shrink the photos first. Open Compress Image, set a target of about 200–300 KB, leave width and height empty, and compress all the photos at once (up to 50). Then build the PDF from the smaller copies. Image to PDF re-saves each photo at the quality you choose, so check the final size on the download button and lower the quality a little if needed.
3. Split it. If the portal has separate upload slots for different documents, make one PDF per document instead of one large file. A PDF you’ve already made can be cut into parts with Split PDF.

If something goes wrong

• A page is sideways or upside down in the PDF. Rotate that photo in Image to PDF and create the PDF again.
• Pages are in the wrong order. Move them with the arrow buttons before tapping Create PDF. Changing anything clears the finished file, so you always download what you see.
• Text is hard to read. Retake the photo closer and in better light. Lowering the quality further will not help, and very small target sizes in Compress Image will make it worse.
• An iPhone photo won’t add. The first HEIC photo needs an internet connection in Chrome, Firefox and Edge, to download the converter. If a photo is still syncing from iCloud, wait for it to download to the phone and choose it again.
• The portal says the file is too large. Work through step 4. The download button shows the exact size before you save.

Why it matters where you combine them

Certificates, ID cards and bank statements carry your name, date of birth, address and account details. Many online converters upload them to a server to build the PDF, and you can’t see how long they are kept there.

Velprio’s Image to PDF builds the file in your browser, on your own phone or computer, so the documents are never sent anywhere. You don’t have to take our word for it: the Security page explains how to check it in your own browser.