Turning photos into a PDF on your phone
, 4 min read
Offices and portals want one PDF. Your phone produces a dozen separate photos. Bridging that gap does not need an app, and avoiding apps is worth something: most document scanner apps on the stores upload your pages to their servers and show you ads.
The method
- Photograph each page. Good light, phone parallel to the page, page filling the frame.
- Open Image to PDF in your phone browser and tap Choose files. Both Android and iOS let you select multiple photos at once.
- Check the order in the list and drag anything out of place. The list order becomes the page order.
- Set page size to A4 so it prints correctly, then convert and download.
The PDF is saved to your phone's Downloads or Files app and can be attached to email or WhatsApp as normal.
Making it look like a scan
Photographs of paper look like photographs: grey, uneven, shadowed. Run them through Document Scanner first and grayscale mode evens out the lighting and whitens the paper. It also reduces the file size substantially, because a flat white background compresses far better than a mottled grey one.
When the file is too big to send
Ten phone photos can easily produce a 30 MB PDF. Compress PDF handles most cases, and if a portal states a hard limit, Compress PDF to 1 MB aims directly at it.
iPhone users with HEIC photos should note that Safari handles them natively, so convert on the iPhone itself rather than moving files to a Windows machine first.