Convert JPG to PDF

To convert JPG to PDF, select the images and print them to a PDF with the Photos app on Windows, Preview on Mac, or the built-in sharing options on a phone. PDF Viewer on this site does not build a PDF from image files, but once you have the PDF it can reorder, rotate and merge the pages in your browser. Here is how to do it on each platform without extra software.

Which JPG to PDF method for which case

Every operating system can already make a PDF out of pictures; the difference is in how many images you can combine at once and how much control you get over page size and quality.

Main method: Windows Photos and macOS Preview, step by step

Windows 10 and 11:

1. Select the JPGs in File Explorer in the order you want (Ctrl-click), right-click and choose Print.
2. In the Print Pictures dialog pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer.
3. Choose the paper size, the Full page photo layout and whether to Fit picture to frame.
4. Click Print and pick where to save the PDF.

macOS:

1. In Finder, select the images and right-click, then Quick Actions, Create PDF. That is it for a quick file.
2. For control: open all images in Preview (they land in one window), select all thumbnails, choose File, Print.
3. Set paper size and Scale to Fit, then click the PDF menu and Save as PDF.

Command line: img2pdf *.jpg -o scans.pdf wraps the JPGs losslessly; magick *.jpg scans.pdf works too but re-encodes the images. Online converters (iLovePDF, Smallpdf, Adobe) are fine for a vacation album, but every photo is uploaded to their servers, which matters for IDs, receipts and medical paperwork.

After the PDF exists: order, rotate, OCR

A PDF made from photos is a scanned PDF: pictures of pages with no text. Open it in the viewer on this site and fix the usual problems there, nothing uploaded:

• Pages in the wrong order: drag the thumbnails to reorder the pages.
• Sideways phone shots: rotate the page by 90 degrees.
• Two separate PDFs: merge them by appending one to the other.
• Need to search or copy the text: run OCR, which adds an invisible text layer. It is slow on long scans but makes Ctrl+F work.

Then download; the new PDF contains your changes.

What to watch for

• File size. Twelve-megapixel photos make a PDF of tens of megabytes. Resize to 1500 to 2500 pixels wide before converting if the pages are documents, or see compress PDF.
• Margins and cropping. Fit keeps the whole image with white borders; Fill crops the edges. Pick Fit for documents.
• Orientation. Some photos carry a rotation flag that a PDF printer ignores; rotate the image first or fix the page afterward.
• Color. Printing to PDF may convert to a printer color profile; pure black text can turn gray.

Page size, orientation and quality settings explained

Every method above asks the same three questions, sometimes without showing them.

• Paper size. Letter in the US, A4 elsewhere. A photo does not match either ratio, so the converter either pads with white (Fit) or crops (Fill). For documents, choose Fit; for an album, Fill looks cleaner.
• Orientation. Windows Print Pictures and Preview rotate each page to match the image if you leave orientation on Auto or print each selection separately; a mixed batch printed in Portrait puts landscape photos sideways with large margins.
• Resolution and quality. A 3000-pixel-wide photo on an 8.5-inch page is about 350 DPI, more than enough. The PDF printer may re-encode JPGs at its own quality level; img2pdf keeps the bytes untouched, which is why it produces smaller files with no new artifacts.

Set these once in the dialog and the PDF comes out uniform, even from a mix of phone shots and scanner output.

Check the result

Open the finished PDF in the online PDF viewer and scroll the thumbnails: every image should be its own page, upright and uncropped. Zoom in on a text-heavy page to see whether the resolution is enough to read. If you ran OCR, press Ctrl+F and search for a word you can see on the page.

Frequently asked questions