How to use it
- Add PNG or JPG images by dropping them on the panel or clicking it to browse. You can add more at any time; new images go to the end.
- Choose a page size, orientation, and margin. The previews update straight away.
- Check the order. Drag a card to move it, or use ↑ and ↓ — these buttons work with the keyboard and on touch screens. Rotate any sideways image with ⟲ or ⟳, and remove any you do not want with ✕.
- Click Build PDF and download
images.pdf.
For a worked example with sample files you can download, see turning three document photos into an A4 PDF.
Page size, orientation, and fit
- A4 is 210 × 297 mm (595.28 × 841.89 PDF points) and US Letter is 8.5 × 11 in (612 × 792 points). A PDF point is 1/72 inch.
- Automatic orientation gives landscape pages to images that are wider than they are tall (after any rotation you apply), and portrait pages to the rest. Choose Portrait or Landscape to make every page the same.
- Fit: each image is scaled, up or down, until it touches the margins on two sides, then centred. The aspect ratio is kept and nothing is cropped, so the remaining space shows as white.
- Margins apply on all four sides. 10 mm suits most printers, which cannot print right to the edge of the paper.
- Match each image keeps the previous behaviour: every page is exactly the image's pixel size in points, with no margin. Pages are then usually much larger than paper, and differ in size if the images do. Use it for on-screen documents; choose A4 or Letter for printing.
Scaling an image on a page does not change its pixels: the full-resolution image is embedded, and the page size only decides how large it is displayed. To check whether an image has enough pixels for a sharp print, divide its pixel width by the printed width in inches — see the resolution formula. Enlarging a small image to fill a page can make it look soft.
Order and rotation
The page number on each card is the page it will become. The PDF follows that order exactly, whatever order the files were chosen in.
Phone photos often store their orientation as a tag rather than as rotated pixels. The previews and the PDF both apply that tag, so a photo that looks upright in the preview will be upright in the PDF. If a photo is still sideways, rotate it here; the rotation is applied to the page placement only, and the image data is not re-encoded.
Supported formats
PNG and JPG only. If you add another format, it is not added to the list and a message names the file and the reason.
| Format | Accepted? | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| JPG / JPEG | Yes | Embedded as it is — not decoded and re-compressed |
| PNG | Yes | Embedded losslessly, including transparency, which shows the white page behind it |
| WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP | No | Convert to PNG or JPG with the Image Converter first |
| HEIC / HEIF | No | Export as JPEG from your photo app, or set an iPhone camera to "Most Compatible" |
| TIFF, SVG, RAW | No | Export to PNG or JPG from the application that made them |
Which of PNG or JPG to use for scanned pages is covered in which image format to save.
Privacy and local processing
Your images are read into this browser tab and the PDF is assembled there by pdf-lib, an open-source library that this site serves from its own domain. The tool has no upload code, and the result exists only in the tab's memory until you save it.
JPEGs are embedded unchanged, so any EXIF metadata they carry — including GPS location — travels into the PDF. If that matters, remove it before building the document; re-encoding with the Image Converter drops EXIF as a side effect.
You can confirm the local-processing claim with your browser's network panel: see how to verify it yourself.
What it does not do
- No OCR. Pages are pictures, so the text cannot be selected, searched, or read by a screen reader. Making a scan searchable requires optical character recognition, which Workbench does not perform. What that means in practice.
- No scan enhancement. No automatic cropping, deskewing, perspective correction, or contrast adjustment. A phone's document-scanning mode does these at capture time.
- No compression. Image quality is not reduced to shrink the file.
- One image per page, with no captions, headers, or page numbers.
File size and device limits
JPEGs pass through unchanged, so a PDF of JPEGs is roughly the sum of the files. PNGs are decompressed and re-compressed losslessly as they are embedded, which can make the PDF larger than the source files. For large photographed pages, JPG is normally the better input.
There is no limit set by us, but memory on your device is a real limit. Previews use small copies of each image. When you build, images are embedded one at a time, but the PDF being assembled holds all of them, so peak memory grows with the whole set. On a phone, long sets of camera photos are the most likely to fail. Build several smaller PDFs and join them with Merge PDF if that happens.
Troubleshooting
- "Not added: … is not a PNG or JPG"
- The file is another format (often HEIC or WebP) or has the wrong extension. Convert it first, as described in supported formats.
- "Could not read …"
- The browser could not decode the image to preview it, usually because the file is damaged or incomplete. Re-export it from the app that created it.
- "Page N (…) could not be embedded"
- A few unusual PNG or JPEG variants cannot be embedded even though they display. The failing page is named; remove it or re-save it as a standard JPG or PNG. The rest of your list is kept.
- The printed pages are cropped at the edges
- Use a margin of at least 5–10 mm, and print at "Actual size" or "Fit to page" as you prefer. With image-sized pages, choose "Fit to page".
- The tab reloaded while building
- Memory. Build in smaller sets and combine them with Merge PDF.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I make A4 or Letter pages?
- Yes. Choose the page size, orientation, and margin; each image is fitted inside the margins without cropping.
- Can I reorder the pages?
- Yes — drag the cards, or use the move buttons, which also work with a keyboard.
- Will the images lose quality?
- No re-compression is applied: JPEGs are embedded as they are and PNGs losslessly. How sharp a page looks still depends on how many pixels the image has for the size it is displayed at.
- Can I search the text in the finished PDF?
- No. The pages are images. That requires OCR, which this tool does not perform.
- Does it work offline?
- Once the page and its PDF library have loaded, building a PDF does not need a connection. That shows the work can happen locally, but offline operation alone is not proof of what a page does while online; the network check is the direct test.
- Is it free, and do I need an account?
- It is free, with no account or sign-up.
Sources
- ISO 216 defines the A-series paper sizes; A4 is 210 × 297 mm. Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is the North American standard size (ANSI/ASME Y14.1 "A").
- Default PDF user-space unit of 1/72 inch: section 8.3.2.3 of Adobe's PDF 32000-1:2008 (reference copy of ISO 32000-1).
- pdf-lib documentation (MIT licence), the library used to build the PDF.
- EXIF orientation: CIPA DC-008, Exchangeable image file format for digital still cameras, tag 0x0112.