How it works
- You add two or more JPG or PNG files and set their order in the staging list. Each is read into an ArrayBuffer in this tab. Nothing is uploaded.
- pdf-lib embeds each image into a new document. JPEG data is embedded as-is — the original bytes are copied into the PDF without being decoded and re-encoded, so a photograph loses nothing in the transfer. PNG data is embedded with its alpha channel preserved and composited over white, since a PDF page has no transparency behind it.
- Each image gets its own page, sized to the image's aspect ratio and scaled so the whole image fits within the page box. Images larger than the page are scaled down, never cropped, so nothing is silently cut off the edge of a receipt.
- The page order is the list order, top to bottom. Moving a file up or down in the staging list moves its page, which matters when the images are pages of a document photographed out of sequence.
- The finished PDF is serialised once and offered as a blob URL held only by this tab. Closing or reloading the page discards the images and the output.
Limitations
Page sizes follow the images, not a paper standard. A set of photos shot in portrait and landscape produces a PDF with mixed page dimensions, which looks correct on screen and awkward on a printer. If the output has to be printed or filed against a form that expects A4, it is worth cropping the sources to a consistent aspect ratio first.
HEIC is not accepted here. iPhone photos in their native format have to be converted to JPG before they can be embedded, because the PDF specification has no HEIC image type. Convert them first, then come back.
There is no OCR. The output is a PDF that contains pictures of text, not a PDF containing text. It will not be searchable, selectable or readable by a screen reader, and running it through a PDF-to-Word converter afterwards will produce a Word file with a picture in it. If searchability matters, use a scanner app that adds an OCR layer.
File size roughly follows the sum of the inputs. There is no compression pass on the way in, deliberately — a receipt photographed at full phone resolution stays legible. If the result is too large for an upload form, compress it afterwards rather than degrading the images before they go in.
Questions
Is there a file size limit?
No cap is enforced, and you can add several images at once. The practical limit is your device's memory, since every image is held in the tab while the document is assembled. A few dozen phone photos is comfortable; several hundred is not.
Can I add HEIC photos from my iPhone?
Not directly — a PDF cannot hold HEIC image data. Convert them to JPG first and then add the results here. It is one extra step and it is unavoidable, not a limitation we chose.
Will the text in my photos be searchable?
No. This tool places images on pages; it does not read them. The output is a picture of a document. If you need the text extractable, use a scanning app that performs OCR when it captures.
Are my images cropped to fit the page?
Never. Each image is scaled down to fit inside the page box with its aspect ratio intact. A wide receipt gets a wide page rather than losing its edges.
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no email step and no usage counter. The tool is paid for by the ads on this page.
When people use it
Expense claims are the single most common reason. A finance system wants one PDF; you have eleven photographs of receipts taken over three weeks. The order matters because the claim form lists them in date order, and the staging list is where you fix that before the file exists rather than after.
The other reason is documents that were never digital. A handwritten form, a passport page, a certificate on a wall — photographed with a phone and needed as a single attachment. Assembling them into one PDF is what turns a camera roll into something an institutional upload form will accept.
iPhone photos usually arrive as HEIC, which a PDF cannot hold. HEIC to JPG converts them in the browser first, and the results drop straight into the list here.
How it compares
The advantage over an online converter is straightforward: photographs of your passport, your signature and your bank paperwork never leave the device. What a dedicated scanner app does better is everything before this step — perspective correction, edge detection, contrast normalisation and an OCR text layer all happen at capture time and cannot be added afterwards. If the photos are skewed and shadowed, rescanning beats assembling.