iPhone photos to PDF, straight from Safari, no app to install

Make the PDF on the phone

Jana Čermák has 6 photos of a damaged parcel and the courier in Graz wants them as 1 PDF. This is the whole job, on an iPhone, in Safari:

1. Open the tool. Go to getpdfs.app/heic-to-pdf in Safari. The page is the converter; there is nothing to sign up for.
2. Tap Choose files. iOS offers your photo library or the Files app. Pick the library, tick the 6 photos, and confirm. They appear as a list on the page, with each file’s name and size.
3. Check the order. The photos become pages in the order of that list. Tap Up or Down next to a photo to move it 1 place, or Remove to drop it. Jana moves the photo of the shipping label to the top, so the courier sees the tracking number first.
4. Pick the page. Under Options, Paper is A4 by default, with US Letter, US Legal, A3, A5 and “Same as the picture” in the list. Orientation on Auto turns each page to match its photo. Leave Margin at 0 for a file that is read on screens, or set 10 (millimetres) if it will be printed.
5. Tap Make the PDF. The first time, the page fetches the HEIC decoder (2 MB) and keeps it, then decodes every photo on the phone. The result lists what happened, for example “6 HEIC photos decoded on this device and written as JPEG at quality 90”.
6. Tap Download PDF. Safari saves the file to Files, in the Downloads folder, the place Apple’s iPhone User Guide names for downloaded files.

The PDF is named after the first photo, such as IMG_0412-and-5-more.pdf. Tap and hold it in Files to rename it to something the courier understands, then send it on.

HEIC works as it is, so skip the detour

iPhones save photos as HEIC by default since iOS 11 (Apple Support, “Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices”, checked on 11 October 2026). Most PDF tools and many computers cannot read HEIC, so the common advice is to screenshot each photo or export it as JPG first. Both cost something: a screenshot is only as sharp as the screen, and an export compresses the photo once more.

Here there is no detour. The tool brings its own HEIC decoder, decodes each photo on the phone at its full resolution and writes it into the PDF as a JPEG at quality 90, the format every PDF reader shows. The rotation the iPhone stored is applied, so a portrait photo becomes a portrait page. Whether Safari hands the page the original HEIC or a JPEG copy of it, the tool reads either, and a JPEG goes into the PDF with its picture data untouched.

The camera details stay behind too. A JPEG’s GPS position, phone model and time are left out of the PDF, and a HEIC is decoded into fresh pixels, so the file does not say where the parcel was photographed.

Order and page size on a small screen

On a phone the list sits above the Options, and every row has its own Up, Down and Remove buttons, which work with a thumb and do not fire by accident while you scroll. Each tap moves a photo 1 place, so for a long set check the order before you start: tap Choose files again to add photos you forgot, and they join the end of the list.

For the page: A4 or US Letter when the PDF will be printed or uploaded to a form that expects a document, “Same as the picture” when it will only be looked at on screens. Be aware that “Same as the picture” takes the size from the photo’s own resolution note, so a 12 megapixel phone photo makes a page over 1 metre wide. Viewers zoom it to fit, but a printer gets a surprise. Picking the page size has the numbers.

Sending the PDF on

From Files, tap and hold the PDF and choose Share, then Mail, Messages, WhatsApp or AirDrop. A portal upload in Safari opens the same Files picker, where the PDF is in Downloads.

Watch the size before mailing it. A full-resolution phone photo is about 2.5 to 3 MB on its page (a 12 megapixel test picture came to 2.5 MB as a camera JPEG and 3.1 MB through the HEIC route), so 10 photos are around 30 MB. iCloud Mail takes 20 MB per message, Gmail and Outlook.com 25 MB, and WhatsApp takes documents up to 2 GB (attachment limits lists them all). To go under a mail limit, run the PDF through Compress PDF in the same Safari tab:

The Email preset lands at about 80 KB per photo page, still clear on a phone screen. Compressing a PDF on an iPhone walks through it.

What this does not do, and when the built-in way is enough

• A big set on an older iPhone can run out of memory. Every photo is decoded at its full 12 megapixels on the phone. If the page reloads halfway, the tab ran out of room: convert in smaller batches, then join the PDFs with Merge PDF.
• The photos stay photos. A photo of a letter is a picture of text, not text. If someone must search or copy from it, run OCR on the PDF afterwards.
• Live Photos, bursts and HDR extras come out as the still photo only. The PDF holds the picture you see in the library, not the motion.
• iOS has its own way for 1 or 2 photos. The Share menu’s Print option can turn photos into a PDF without any website. The steps differ between iOS versions and Apple’s user guide does not document them, so we do not repeat them here; for a single photo it is often all you need. Come here when the order, the page size, HEIC handling or a larger set matter.

The converter runs in Safari on your phone, so the photos are never uploaded. You can check this yourself: convert a set once, turn on Airplane Mode, and convert again. It still works. Pictures to PDF covers every format and option in one place, and combining photos in the right order helps with larger sets.