Bundle a set of photos into one PDF

A repaired bathroom, 31 photos and a loss adjuster

Tomas runs a small plumbing and tiling business. He has just finished a water damage repair, and the homeowner's insurer wants a single PDF showing the job before, during and after, emailed to the loss adjuster by Friday. His own Android phone produced 26 JPG photos, the homeowner sent four HEIC pictures from an iPhone showing the original leak, and there is one PNG sketch of the floor plan exported from a drawing app.

Three formats, two cameras, portrait and landscape shots, and a reader who will print the report and write on it. That mix is typical for anyone sending photos as evidence of work: builders, property managers, event organisers sending a client recap, makers sending product shots to a shop buyer. The steps below use Tomas's set as the example.

Match each picture format to its converter

The general converter takes the two most common formats together. The rest each have a dedicated PDFGym route, and every route reads the file's real format from its first bytes rather than trusting the name.

Steps for a batch with more than one format

1. Put the files in two folders: everything JPG or PNG in one, the HEIC pictures in the other.
2. Open Images to PDF and add the JPG and PNG folder. Each row shows the format, the pixel size and the file size, and a sideways phone photo is marked "camera rotation applied", meaning it will stand the right way up on its page.
3. Use the arrows to move rows into the story you want to tell: before, during, after, with the floor plan first or last. Remove anything blurred or duplicated with the cross.
4. Choose A4 or US Letter for a report someone will print, and Narrow margins so a hole punch does not bite into a photo. Landscape pictures turn their own page sideways.
5. Press Create PDF, let the check finish and download. The file is named after the first photo with "-images" added, so rename it, for example 14-elm-rd-repair-photos.pdf.
6. Run the HEIC folder through HEIC to PDF with the same page size and margins.
7. Join the two PDFs in Merge PDF. If the leak photos belong at the start, put that file on top; if they need to sit between other pages, move them afterwards in Organize pages.

Telling the story in the right sequence

The list starts in whatever order your computer or phone delivered the files, which may be by name, by date or by the order you tapped them. Photos from a single phone are usually named with the date and time they were taken, so they line up chronologically. Photos from two phones do not: one might be named IMG_20261014_093212.jpg and the other IMG_4471.HEIC, and no sort will interleave those correctly.

For a short set, the arrows are enough. For a long one, rename the files first with a stage and a number, such as 1-before-01, 2-during-01, 3-after-01. Anyone who opens the folder later will understand it too.

Mistakes that make a photo PDF hard to use

The file is far too big to email. The converter adds no compression, so the PDF weighs about as much as all the photos together, and 31 phone pictures can run to tens of megabytes. Build the PDF first, then shrink it once with Compress PDF, which offers 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB and 2 MB presets or an exact size you type. Shrinking each photo beforehand and compressing again later only softens detail twice.

A small picture looks blurry on paper. On A4 or US Letter every image is scaled to fill the space inside the margins, so a 640-pixel-wide thumbnail saved from a message gets stretched across the sheet. Ask the sender for the full-size original, or use Match image for that file.

One photo is still sideways. The rotation tag is followed when the camera wrote one. A picture that was taken sideways with no tag, or rotated in an app that discarded the tag, stays as it is. Turn that page in Rotate PDF after building.

HEIC files are refused. Images to PDF takes JPG and PNG only. Use the HEIC route for those, or set future iPhone photos to JPG under Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible.

When a PDF is not the best way to send photos

If the recipient will crop, zoom or reuse the pictures, such as a designer building a catalogue or an insurer whose system wants separate image files, send the originals in a shared folder or the recipient's own upload portal instead. A PDF is a reading format; pulling photos back out of it is an extra job for them.

Captions, several photos per sheet or a cover page with your logo are layout work. Build that in a word processor or a layout app and export it to PDF from there. For screen captures rather than camera photos, the screenshot guide deals with chat timestamps and very tall phone pages.