Turn receipt and document photos into one PDF

If you’ve photographed receipts or paperwork for an expense report or an application, sending them as one PDF is tidier for you and easier for whoever reviews them. Image to PDF turns your photos into a single PDF with one photo per page, in the order of your list, and its defaults (A4, Auto orientation, Normal margin) are a good place to start. This guide covers how to shoot the photos, which paper and margin settings to pick, how to keep the file small, and how to combine the result with documents that are already PDFs.

Think about the PDF when you take the photos

A PDF made from photos is only as good as the photos. Image to PDF places each photo on a page; it doesn’t straighten pages or remove shadows. So a little care when shooting pays off:

• Lay receipts and documents flat and shoot from directly above.
• Check that shadows or glare from glossy paper don’t cover any text.
• Shoot one receipt per photo. Each photo becomes one page, which makes ordering easy.
• Zoom in afterward to make sure small text such as amounts and dates is readable.
• Crop away extra background in your photos app. The document then fills more of the page. Image to PDF doesn’t crop.

You can add iPhone HEIC photos as they are, because Image to PDF converts HEIC to JPG (quality 92) before placing it. If you’d rather shoot JPG in the first place, Apple Support explains the setting: go to Settings → Camera → Formats and choose Most Compatible. New photos are then saved as JPEG. Photos you’ve already taken stay HEIC, so if you need them as JPG files for another purpose, use HEIC to JPG. For other options, see 3 ways to convert iPhone HEIC photos to JPG.

Choosing paper size, orientation and margins

There are three settings. If the recipient hasn’t asked for anything specific, the defaults are fine.

Setting	Choices	How to choose
Paper size	A4 (default, 595.28×841.89pt), Letter (612×792pt), Original size	A4 for submitting or printing; Letter for the size used in the US and some other countries
Orientation	Auto (default), Portrait, Landscape	Auto puts only photos that are wider than they are tall on landscape paper. Choose Portrait or Landscape to give every page the same orientation
Margin	None (0pt), Normal (36pt, default, about 12.7mm), Wide (72pt, about 25.4mm)	Wide for documents you’ll print and bind; None for PDFs you’ll only view on screen

Each photo is placed as large as it fits inside the margins, keeping its proportions, and centered. Photos are never stretched or squashed, so if a photo’s shape differs from the paper’s, the extra area stays blank.

“Original size” works differently. It treats the image’s pixels as 96 dpi (px ÷ 96 × 72pt) to set the page size, then adds the selected margin around it. The photo is placed at its own size, neither enlarged nor reduced, and since each page follows the shape of its photo, there’s no orientation to choose. An 800×600 JPG with Original size and no margin gave a 600×450pt page. Measured in desktop Chrome; results vary by device and browser.

How formats, rotation and photo data are handled

Photo you add	How it goes into the PDF
JPG	Placed as is, without recompression; only the shooting info (EXIF, location, XMP, IPTC) is removed
PNG	Placed as is; transparent areas are kept
WebP, AVIF, HEIC, GIF	Converted to JPG (quality 92) first; transparent areas become white, and only the first frame of an animated GIF is used

Transparent areas turn white because the JPEG format doesn’t support transparency (it has no alpha channel), as MDN explains. Whether you add JPGs or formats that get converted to JPG, such as HEIC, shooting info like location isn’t carried into the PDF.

Phone photos often use rotation info (EXIF orientation) to display in portrait. Image to PDF applies that info and places each photo the way it looks on screen. With the defaults, a HEIC shown in portrait (21 KB) plus an 800×600 PNG with a transparent background (204 KB) became a 228 KB PDF with two pages: portrait A4 and landscape A4, measured the same way. If a photo itself was saved sideways, though, this tool can’t rotate it. Rotate and save it in your photos app first, then add it.

When the file is too big, or you need to add other PDFs

JPGs go in without recompression, so the PDF ends up close to the total size of the photos you added. Three JPGs of 4.0 MB, 117 KB and 49 KB made a 4.1 MB PDF, measured the same way. If that’s over the recipient’s limit, shrink the photos first with Compress Image (lower quality) or Resize Image (fewer pixels), then add them. Afterward, zoom in to check that amounts and dates are still readable.

If some documents are already PDFs, such as receipts that arrived by email, make the PDF from your photos first. Then combine everything in the order you want with Merge PDF. Merging copies pages as they are instead of turning them into images, so quality doesn’t change. For what to check before you merge, see What to check before merging PDFs for a submission.

Image to PDF takes up to 100 photos at a time. We recommend a combined total of up to 200 MB on desktop and 50 MB on mobile, and files that would bring the total over 500 MB can’t be added.

How to do it with ZEKILO Studio

1. Open Image to PDF and drag and drop your photos or pick them with [Choose files]. The order of the list becomes the page order of the PDF.
2. Drag rows or use the up and down buttons to set the order, choose “Paper size”, “Orientation” and “Margin”, then press [Start].
3. Save the PDF with [Download]. The big number on the result card is the page count of the PDF.

The result is named images.pdf. If you add just one photo, its original name is used, as in photo.jpg → photo.pdf. Your photos are processed in this browser and never leave your device.

Summary

• Lay documents flat, shoot from directly above, and zoom in to check that small text is readable.
• The list order is the page order. One document per photo keeps things simple.
• The defaults are A4, Auto orientation and a Normal margin. Pick a Wide margin for printing and binding, or None for on-screen viewing.
• HEIC photos work as they are. Rotation info is applied, and shooting info doesn’t end up in the PDF.
• JPGs aren’t recompressed, so shrink large photos first, and use Merge PDF to add documents that are already PDFs.