The Most Common Reason People Ask For This
Last month I helped my mum apply for a visa. The form said: "Upload your supporting documents as a single PDF, maximum 5MB, all images must be inside that PDF."
She had eight photos of her papers, taken on her phone, totaling around 40MB. She had no idea where to start.
This is the most common version of "convert images to PDF" — taking multiple photos and bundling them into a single deliverable. Governments do this. Universities do this. Insurance companies do this. The world runs on PDFs even when the input is clearly a phone camera.
So here's the workflow, end to end, with the tools to do each step.
The Full Workflow
For my mum's case, the path was:
[8 phone photos, 40MB]
│
▼
[Resize each to 1500px wide]
│
▼
[Combine into one PDF]
│
▼
[Compress the PDF]
│
▼
[4MB PDF, ready to upload]
Three tools, about two minutes of work. Let me break down each step.
Step 1: Resize the Images (Optional but Smart)
Phone cameras shoot at absurd resolutions. A photo of a printed document at 12 megapixels has more detail than the original printout. You're wasting space.
I built an image resizer for exactly this reason. Drag your image in, set a max width (1500–2000px is plenty for document photos), download. Repeat for each image.
If your originals are screenshots or already small (under 1MB each), skip this step. If they're phone photos, do it. You'll shrink the final PDF by 80%.
Step 2: Combine Into a Single PDF
The image to PDF tool takes any number of images — JPG, PNG, WebP — and bundles them into one PDF, one image per page.
Drop them in. Reorder if needed. Click create. Download. Done.
The tool fits each image to A4 size by default, which is what most document upload forms expect. If you need a different page size, that's configurable.
This is one of those tools that's a single button on the surface but solves a surprisingly annoying problem. There's no native "select 8 images, save as PDF" in Windows or in most Macs. You can do it in Preview if you know the exact right key combination. Most people don't.
Step 3: Compress If Needed
If the resulting PDF is still too big for the upload limit, run it through the compressor. Medium quality usually gets you a 5–10x reduction without anyone being able to tell.
If you did Step 1 (resize), you can probably skip Step 3. The bottleneck for most "images bundled as PDF" is image resolution, not PDF overhead.
The Reverse Direction: PDF to Images
The opposite problem is just as common. Someone sends you a 20-page PDF and you want to grab one specific page as a PNG to drop into a Slack message or a slide deck.
The PDF to image tool handles this. Upload the PDF, pick the pages you want, download them as PNGs or JPGs.
This is one of those tasks that feels like it should be a native OS feature and somehow isn't. On Windows it takes screenshots, image editors, and prayer. On Mac you can sort of do it with Preview if you cooperate. In the browser it's three clicks.
Combining With Other Tools
The strength of having a collection of tools instead of one giant app is that you can chain them.
Some workflows I've actually used:
Submitting a passport for a visa renewal:
- Take a photo of the passport bio page
- Resize to 1200px wide
- Convert to PDF
- Upload to the consulate portal
Sending a single page from a report:
- Split the PDF, extract page 7
- Convert page 7 to an image
- Paste into Slack
Combining receipts for an expense report:
- Take photos of 6 paper receipts
- Bundle into one PDF
- Compress to meet the 5MB submission limit
- Submit
None of this is rocket science. None of it requires Adobe. All of it can be done in a browser on a Chromebook.
Why Browser Tools Are Right for This
The thing about image and PDF manipulation is that the files are yours. They're documents you photographed, receipts you collected, screenshots you took. The idea of uploading them to some random service just to bundle them is faintly absurd when you think about it.
Your browser can read files. Your browser can render images. Your browser can write PDFs. Why involve a server at all?
I wrote a longer post about the principle behind this. The short version: browser-based tools are private by design (no server can leak what it never had), fast (no upload/download round-trip), and free to run forever (no hosting cost per user).
Try It
All the tools mentioned here:
No account, no upload, no watermark. Drag, do, download.
If you've got a workflow that should exist as a tool but doesn't, I'm at [email protected].