How to Turn Photos of Documents into One PDF
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An application asks for "one PDF, at most 2 MB" and what you have is six photos of paper pages on your phone. Turning them into a single, small PDF takes three short steps, and none of the pages has to leave your device.
Photograph the pages well
Lay each page flat on a dark table near a window and take the photo from directly above, so the page fills the frame and its edges are parallel to the edges of the picture.
Avoid the flash, which leaves a bright patch, and check that your hand or phone does not cast a shadow across the text.
Combine the photos into a PDF
- 1Open JPG to PDF and add all the photos. iPhone HEIC photos work too.
- 2Use the arrows to put the pages in the right order.
- 3Choose A4 as the page size for documents. Each photo is centred on its own page, turned sideways when the photo is wide.
- 4Press Create PDF and download the file.
Make the PDF smaller
A PDF made from phone photos is large, often several megabytes per page. Open Compress PDF, add the file, and start with Medium. If the result is still over the limit, try Strong.
Compression redraws every page as an image at a lower resolution. That suits photographed and scanned pages. For a PDF that contains real, selectable text, keep the original, because the text will no longer be selectable afterwards and the file is often small already.
Read the result before you send it. Small print should still be easy to read at Strong; if it is not, go back to Medium and reduce the number of pages instead.
Add or remove pages
To put your new PDF together with one you already have, such as a form you filled in on the computer, use Merge PDF and set the order.
To send only some pages, use Split PDF and type the pages you want, for example 1-3, 5.
If the portal wants images instead
Some portals accept only JPG files. PDF to JPG saves each page of a PDF as its own image, numbered in page order.