How to Turn Photos of Documents into a Clean PDF

Taking photos that convert well

• Lay the page flat on a plain, contrasting surface — a dark table for white paper.
• Use even light from a window or lamp, without your own shadow falling across the page.
• Hold the phone directly above and parallel to the page. Tilting causes keystone distortion that straightens poorly later.
• Fill the frame with the page and keep the text in focus. Photograph in portrait for portrait pages.
• Take every page in the same orientation, in order. It saves sorting later.

JPG to PDF or Scan to PDF?

Both tools combine images into a PDF, one image per page, but they differ in how they size pages:

• JPG to PDF makes each page exactly the pixel size of the photo. A 12-megapixel phone photo becomes a very large page, and mixed photo sizes give a PDF with pages of different sizes. It is quick and keeps full quality.
• Scan to PDF places images onto standard A4 or US Letter pages (or keeps the original size), with margins, and can convert to grayscale. It suits documents you will print, submit, or send.

Both accept JPG, PNG, and WebP images, and the conversion happens in your browser.

Scan to PDF settings explained

• Page size: A4, US Letter, or Original (each page matches its image).
• Fit mode: Fit shows the whole image with white space if the shapes differ; Fill covers the page and may crop the image; Stretch forces the image to the page shape and can distort it. For documents, Fit is almost always right.
• Margin: the white border around each page. About 0.5 inch (36 points) is a comfortable default; use none for full-page scans.
• Grayscale: converts to black-and-white tones, which usually looks cleaner for text and keeps the file much smaller.

After you have the PDF

• Shrink it. If the file is large, run Compress PDF. See how to compress a PDF without losing quality.
• Make it searchable. The pages are pictures, so you cannot search them. Run OCR PDF to add a text layer — see how to make a scanned PDF searchable.
• Fix orientation. Use Rotate PDF if some pages came out sideways.
• Fix the order. Use Organize PDF to drag pages into position.