A photo of a document as a PDF: when a picture is enough, and when to scan

Make the PDF from your photo

1. Drop the photos, 1 per page, in page order (Up and Down fix the order). JPG, HEIC from an iPhone and PNG all work.
2. Paper: A4 (US Letter in North America), Orientation: Auto, so a portrait photo gets a portrait page.
3. Margin: 10 millimetres and Fit. The whole photo shows, on white, with a border like a printed page.
4. Click Make the PDF, then Download PDF.

A portrait photo from a 12 megapixel phone (3024 by 4032 pixels) fills 190 by 253 mm of an A4 page this way, about 404 pixels per inch: more detail than a printer uses. Fill would cover the page edge to edge instead and cut about 9 % of the photo off, which on a document can be a line of text, so keep Fit.

Photo or scan: what is the difference?

A scan, or a phone scanner app, does 4 things a camera photo does not: it finds the edges of the page and crops to them, straightens a page shot at an angle, evens out the light and shadow, and often turns the paper white. Apple’s document scanner in Notes and Files, for example, captures once it detects the page boundaries and lets you drag the corners to fit the page (Apple Support, “Scan text and documents in Notes using the iPhone camera”, checked on 11 October 2026).

A converter, ours included, does none of that. It puts your photo on a page exactly as you took it: the tilt, the shadow of your phone, the corner of the kitchen table. That is honest, and often fine, but it is not a scan.

When a photo is fine

• 1 or 2 pages that someone only reads: a signed form a colleague needs today, a receipt for an expense claim, a page for a tutor. The reader looks at it once, on a screen.
• The text is large and the light is good. A sharp phone photo resolves print far smaller than anyone needs.
• No office will check it. Nobody holds it against a scanning standard or archives it for 10 years.

When it is more than a few pages, when it will be printed again, or when an official body receives it, scan. Many portals and offices state what they accept; read the upload instructions before you photograph 30 pages.

Shooting pages that survive

These come from what a converter cannot fix afterwards:

1. Flat. Press the page flat on a table; a curled page bends the lines of text.
2. Straight overhead. Hold the phone parallel to the paper, centred over it. An angle makes the far edge narrower, and nothing straightens it later.
3. Even light. Daylight from a window to the side, not a lamp from behind you, which puts your shadow on the page. Turn the flash off; it makes a glare spot on glossy paper.
4. Fill the frame. The page should reach nearly to the photo’s edges, with a strip of table all round so no corner is cut off.
5. 1 page per photo. Two pages side by side in one photo come out at half the size each.
6. Check it before you move on. Zoom in on the smallest print. If you cannot read it in the photo, nobody can in the PDF.

A distracting background can also be removed from the photo itself before it becomes a page; our sister tool getPNG does that in the browser too.

Making it searchable later

A document photo is a picture of text. To make the words searchable and copyable, run the finished PDF through OCR:

OCR PDF reads the text in each page picture and adds an invisible text layer on top, so search and copy work while the page looks the same. It shows how sure it is for every page and warns when a page is under 60 %. Straight, evenly lit, sharp photos read best; tilt, curl and shadow lower the confidence, which is one more reason to shoot carefully. Making a scanned PDF searchable explains the whole process.

Size: from megabytes to kilobytes

Each photo keeps its full resolution: about 2.5 MB per page for a 12 megapixel phone photo. For a portal or an email, that is often too much. Compress PDF on the Email preset brings a phone photo page to roughly 80 KB at 110 dpi, which stays readable on screen; in our test, 5 phone photos went from 14.7 MB to 395 KB.

What this does not do

• It does not straighten, crop or brighten. The photo goes on the page as taken. A tilted, shadowed photo makes a tilted, shadowed page.
• It does not make a photo an original. Some banks, notaries and authorities reject photographed documents and want a scan or the paper itself. A PDF of a photo is still a photo; check the receiver’s rules first.
• It does not read the text by itself. Without OCR, the words are pixels: nobody can search or copy them.

The conversion runs on your device, so a photo of an invoice or an ID document is never uploaded. For the margin choice in depth see margins for image PDFs, and for every picture format, Pictures to PDF.