Make a PDF photo album anyone can open, in the order you tell it

Make the album now

Why a PDF works as an album

A folder of 60 JPEGs sent to relatives in Vienna arrives as 60 loose files. Their phone sorts them its own way, the story is lost, and half of them stay unopened. A PDF fixes 3 things at once:

• It opens everywhere with what the device already has: a phone, a tablet, a work laptop, a smart TV browser. No app, no account, no link that expires.
• The order is fixed. Page 1 is the arrival, page 60 the last dinner. Nobody can shuffle it.
• It is 1 file. It forwards, prints and archives as 1 thing.

And the album leaves out what a phone hides in each photo: JPG to PDF drops the GPS position, the phone model and the time, and copies only the picture. The result card counts it (“Left out the camera details of 60 photos”).

Step 1: pick and order the photos

The PDF follows the file list from top to bottom. Two ways to get the story right:

1. By name, before you start. Rename the files with leading zeros (001-arrival.jpg, 002-harbour.jpg) and drop the whole folder: click or a whole folder under the drop zone, or drag the folder onto the page. A dropped folder is sorted the way people count, so 9 comes before 10.
2. By hand, after dropping. Each photo in the list has Up and Down, which move it 1 place, and Remove. Fine for 15 photos; for 60, renaming is faster.

There is no sort by date taken yet. Photos straight from a phone are usually named by time (IMG_20260712_101544.jpg), which already sorts in the order they were shot.

Step 2: let landscape photos have landscape pages

The options decide how each photo sits on its page:

Phone photos carry a note that says which way up the phone was held, and the converter follows it, so a photo that stood upright on your phone stands upright in the album. If one still lies sideways, turn that page afterwards with Rotate PDF.

Step 3: a caption or 2, kept short

Make the PDF and download it. Then open it in Add text to PDF, which is the getPDF editor with the Text tool ready:

1. Drop the album on the page. It opens in the editor, on your device.
2. Pick Text (key T), click where the caption goes, type “Graz, July 2026” and press Enter to place it.
3. Change the size or colour in the options bar if the photo behind it is dark.
4. Press Save. The caption is real text in the PDF, so a search for “Graz” finds the page.

Keep captions to a date, a place, a name. An album with a paragraph on every page reads like a report.

Step 4: decide how to share it

The album is about as big as the photos together, because they go in unchanged. We measured it: 20 phone photos of 12 megapixels each made a 60.7 MB PDF, so a 60-photo album is roughly 180 MB.

For an email version, run a copy through Compress PDF. The Email preset took our 20-photo album from 60.7 MB to 2.2 MB; on a phone screen it still looks fine, printed at full page it looks soft. Keep the full-size PDF as the original and send the small one. Make a PDF smaller explains how far photos can shrink, and send a large PDF covers the link route.

The honest part: what a PDF album is not

• No layouts or spreads. 1 photo per page, centred. For 2 or 4 photos on a page, run the finished album through N-up; for designed spreads with mixed photo sizes, a photo book service or a layout app does it better.
• No print binding. A PDF printed at home is loose pages. A printed, bound photo book with good paper is a different product, and the services that make one are worth what they cost.
• No sort by date taken. The order is the list’s order, so name the files or move them by hand.
• Big albums take memory. Everything happens in the browser tab, so the limit is your device. 60 photos are routine on a laptop; on an older phone, make 2 albums of 30 and join them with Merge PDF.

What this is: the fast, free, shareable copy that opens on any device, while the original photos stay exactly where they are. Combine photos into one PDF covers the ordering in more depth, and pictures to PDF every other picture job.