The fast way: pick the tool for your file type
How you save a photo as a PDF depends mostly on what kind of picture you have. Each of these is the same page builder, set up for one format:
- JPG to PDF for phone photos, camera pictures and scans. The JPG data goes into the PDF as it is, so there is no second round of quality loss.
- PNG to PDF for screenshots, diagrams and logos. Pixels stay exact, and transparent areas show a page colour you choose.
- WebP to PDF for pictures saved from websites. A PDF cannot hold WebP, so the pixels are stored in a form it understands.
Then the steps are the same for all of them:
- Choose the picture, or drop it on the page. You can add more pictures at any time.
- Set the page: size (A4, US Letter and others, or a page the size of the picture), orientation and margins.
- Pick Smaller file or Original quality.
- Create the PDF, check the preview and download it.
Nothing is uploaded. The PDF is built in your browser, so a photo of a passport, a signed form or a medical letter never leaves your device. You can check that yourself with the steps in is it safe to upload a PDF to a free website.
Save a picture as a PDF on a computer
On a Mac, Preview can do it for a single image: open the picture, choose File, then Export as PDF. On Windows, you can open the picture, press Print and choose Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. Both work for one image and both give you little control over page size, margins and file size.
A browser tool is better the moment you have more than one picture, or want a specific paper size. Open the page, select several files at once in your file dialog (Command or Ctrl click, or Shift for a run) and they all land in the same PDF, one per page, in the order shown (each page takes pictures of its own type, so keep JPGs together and PNGs together). This also answers the common question of how to combine JPG files to PDF: you do not convert them one by one and merge afterwards, you add them together.
Save a photo as a PDF on iPhone and Android
On a phone, open the page in Safari or Chrome and tap Choose files. The picker offers your photo library and your Files app, so you can pick screenshots and photos straight away. After you create the PDF, save it to Files or your downloads folder, and attach it from there.
Phone photos are usually stored sideways with a rotation tag instead of being physically turned. The JPG to PDF page reads that tag and shows the picture upright in the PDF, without changing the JPG itself. If a page is still the wrong way round, turn it left or right in the list before creating the PDF.
One catch for iPhone users: many iPhones save photos as HEIC, and the JPG to PDF page accepts JPG files only. If a photo will not be accepted, share it as a JPG (Photos usually offers this when you send or export, and Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible makes future photos JPG).
Add an image to a PDF you already have
People also search for how to add an image to a PDF or insert a picture into a PDF document. There are two quite different jobs hiding in that question, and it helps to know which you need.
If you want the picture to be its own page in a PDF, for example a scanned signature page added to the end of a contract, do it in two steps. Turn the picture into a one page PDF with the tools above, then join it to your document with Merge PDF. The merge page lets you reorder files and pages, so the new page can go anywhere. The full walkthrough is in how to combine PDF files.
If you want to place a picture on top of an existing page, such as a logo in a corner, ClipLime does not do that. It does not edit or draw on PDF pages, so for that you need a PDF editor.
Page size, margins and fit
You can leave everything on automatic and get a sensible result, but a few settings matter:
- Page size: A4, US Letter, US Legal, A3, A5, or a page exactly the size of the picture. For something that will be printed, match the paper. For something read on a screen, the picture size is often neatest.
- Orientation: automatic turns the page to suit each picture. Or force portrait or landscape.
- Margins: none, small or big. No margin looks like a photo print, a margin looks like a document.
- Fit inside or fill and crop: fit shows the whole picture with spare space around it, fill covers the page and cuts off the edges.
Smaller file or original quality
Both choices keep the picture sharp. They differ in size.
Original quality stores JPG and PNG data exactly as it is. For a JPG that means the PDF is about as big as the photo, no quality is lost, and nothing is re-saved. It is the starting setting on the JPG and PNG pages.
Smaller file reduces pictures to the resolution a page can actually show, so a 12 megapixel photo placed on an A4 page does not carry pixels that no screen or printer will use. This is the default on the WebP page, and it matters there: in our own test, a 199 KB WebP photo became a 2.8 MB PDF with Original quality and a 234 KB PDF with Smaller file, because WebP is stored so efficiently that decoding it to raw pixels inflates it.
If the finished PDF is still too large for an email or a form, Reduce PDF size recompresses the pictures further, and the guide to compressing a PDF shows how to hit a size limit.
Screenshots and graphics: staying crisp
A screenshot saved as PNG goes into the PDF pixel for pixel, so text in the screenshot stays clean when you zoom. If it looks blurry, the usual causes are a screenshot taken at low resolution and then stretched to fill an A4 page, or Smaller file applied to a screenshot with very fine detail. Choose Original quality and a page size close to the picture's own proportions.
One limit to know about: the text inside a picture is still a picture. The PDF will not be searchable, and you cannot select the words, because ClipLime does not read text from images.
Privacy details worth knowing
Photos carry hidden data such as camera model and, often, GPS location. When a JPG goes into a PDF with the JPG to PDF tool, camera details and the location are cut out of each photo before it is stored. The picture data itself is not touched. That is useful when you share a document made from phone photos, because the location of your home or office does not travel with it. To strip that data from photos you use elsewhere, see how to remove location data from photos. The PDF itself can also carry an author and a program name, which what your PDF reveals about you explains.
Limits
- Up to 100 megapixels per picture.
- An animated GIF or WebP gives only its first frame.
- One picture per page. Putting two or more pictures on a single page is not offered.
- Very large sets get a warning, because the PDF is built in your browser's memory.