A rental application wants payslips, ID and a reference letter “as a single PDF”. You have three phone photos, a two-page PDF from the office scanner and a screenshot. This guide takes you from that pile to one clean, correctly ordered PDF that’s legible, searchable if you need it, and small enough to send.
Start with clean pages
No tool can fully rescue a blurry, shadowy photo, so a minute spent on capture pays off later. Whether you use a phone or a flatbed scanner, the aim is the same: flat, evenly lit, in focus, and filling the frame.
- Light it evenly. Daylight from a window, beside rather than behind you, avoids the dark shadow of your phone and hand falling across the page. Turn the flash off: it creates a bright hotspot on glossy paper.
- Hold the phone flat and square. Keep the phone parallel to the page so the edges look rectangular rather than like a trapezium. Many phone camera and notes apps have a document mode that straightens and crops pages automatically; it’s worth using.
- Fill the frame. Get close enough that the page fills most of the picture. Background desk area is wasted pixels and file size.
- Use a contrasting background. White paper on a dark table makes edges easy to see and crop.
- On a scanner, choose 300 dpi. That’s plenty for text and for OCR later. Use grayscale for black-and-white documents; colour only when colour matters, such as for photo ID or stamps. 600 dpi colour mostly creates huge files.
Before moving on, zoom into each photo. If you can’t read the small print on your screen, nobody will read it in the PDF either. Retake it now.
Pick the right route
What you do next depends on what you’ve got:
- Only photos or image files (JPG, PNG or WebP): use JPG to PDF to put them all into one PDF in one go.
- Only PDFs (for example, several scans from an office scanner): use Merge PDF to join them.
- A mixture: convert the photos to a PDF first, then merge that PDF with the others. The section on mixing photos and PDFs walks through it.
If your iPhone saves photos as HEIC, they need to be JPGs first: share or export them as JPG from the Photos app, or set the camera format to “Most Compatible” for future photos. Screenshots are usually PNG already and work as they are.
Photos into one PDF, step by step
- Add the images. Open JPG to PDF and choose or drop all the photos at once. You can add more later.
- Put them in order. Drag the cards into the order you want the pages, or use the arrow buttons. If you named the files 01, 02, 03, Sort A–Z does it in one click.
- Check orientation. Phone photos carry a hidden note saying which way is up, and the tool reads it, so most come out upright automatically. If one is still sideways, use its rotate button.
- Choose a page size. Fit to image makes each page exactly the shape of its photo, which is best for reading on screen. A4 or US Letter gives standard pages that print properly; each image is scaled to fit and centred.
- Choose margins. None for edge to edge, Small (10 mm) or Large (20 mm). A small margin stops printers trimming the edge of a document.
- Shrink very large photos if the tool suggests it. Photos over 4000 pixels across are resized, which keeps the PDF a sensible size with no visible difference on screen.
- Convert and download. You get a single PDF. If you need each photo as its own PDF instead, turn on One PDF per image and you’ll get a ZIP.
Good to know: when a JPG needs no rotating or resizing, it goes into the PDF exactly as it is, with no re-compression and no loss of quality. That’s also why the PDF can be as large as the photos combined; the size section deals with that.
Mixing photos and PDFs
Say the application needs, in order: a cover letter (a PDF you wrote), two payslips (a PDF from the office scanner), your passport photo page (a phone photo) and a reference letter (another phone photo).
- Convert the two phone photos with JPG to PDF, choosing A4 so they match the other documents. Download, for example, photos.pdf.
- Open Merge PDF and add the cover letter, the payslips and photos.pdf.
- Drag the cards into order. Each card shows its first page and page count, so it’s easy to check.
- Merge. Pages keep their original size and quality; nothing is re-compressed.
If the passport page needs to sit between the payslips and the reference letter, but both photos ended up in one PDF, that’s fine: fix the page order in the next step.
Fix order, orientation and stray pages
Open the combined file in Organize pages. Every page appears as a thumbnail, and you can:
- drag pages into the right order, including moving a single page out of a group;
- delete blank pages, such as the empty back of a duplex scan (the Even quick-select helps when every second page is blank);
- rotate any page that came out sideways or upside down;
- insert a blank page if a section should start on a new sheet when printed double-sided.
Everything can be undone until you download. If rotation is the only problem, Rotate PDF is quicker, and it’s lossless: it changes only each page’s rotation setting, not its content.
Make it searchable (optional)
A PDF made from photos or scans is a set of pictures. You can read it, but you can’t search it, copy a sentence from it, or have a screen reader read it out. If any of that matters, run it through OCR PDF. Pick the document’s language (up to three for mixed documents) and choose Searchable PDF. The pages look exactly the same, but now carry an invisible layer of text you can search and select.
OCR reads printed text, not handwriting, and accuracy depends on the capture quality, which is one more reason to start with clean pages. Always check names, dates and numbers against the original.
Get the size down
Phone photos are large, so a PDF of six photos can easily reach 15–30 MB, more than many email services and upload portals accept. Open the finished file in Compress PDF:
- Balanced is a good default: images are kept at about 150 pixels per inch, which looks sharp on screen.
- For black-and-white documents, tick Convert images to grayscale for a big extra saving.
- If a portal has a firm limit, choose Target size and enter it; the tool finds the best quality that fits.
Our guide on compressing a PDF to a specific size covers tight limits like 500 KB and 200 KB in detail.
The order of steps matters a little. Do OCR before compressing, because recognition works best on the sharpest version of each page. Compression keeps the text layer intact.
A word on privacy
The documents people combine are often the most sensitive they own: passports, driving licences, payslips, bank statements and medical letters. Many online PDF services upload those files to a server to process them. Every tool mentioned in this guide runs inside your own browser instead: the photos and PDFs are opened, combined and compressed on your device, and never uploaded. You can read how that works and how to check it yourself.
Wherever you process them, a few habits help: delete extra copies from your downloads folder once you’ve sent the file, don’t leave ID scans in shared folders, and consider adding a password with Protect PDF before emailing something sensitive, sending the password separately.
Quick checklist
- Capture flat, evenly lit pages; retake anything you can’t read.
- Photos → JPG to PDF; PDFs → Merge PDF; mixed → both.
- Fix order, rotation and blanks in Organize pages.
- Optional: OCR to make it searchable.
- Compress to fit the upload or email limit.
- Open the final file, check every page, and send.