A form wants a PDF, and what you have is a few photos on your iPhone: a receipt, the pages of a signed lease, an ID. There's no "Save as PDF" button in Photos, but there are three good ways to do it, one on the phone and two on a computer. The part most guides skip is the file size: the same five photos can make a 1 MB PDF or a 9 MB one, and upload forms often stop at 2, 5 or 10 MB.
We tested on 9 October 2026 with iPhone-sized HEIC photos (4032 × 3024 pixels, 2.0 to 2.7 MB each), on Windows 11 with Chrome 154. The iPhone and Mac steps come from Apple's documentation, not from our own device, and we say where that's the case.
The quick answer
| Where you are | How | You control the size? |
|---|---|---|
| On the iPhone | Files app: select the photos, More, Create PDF | No |
| On a Mac | Preview: open the photos together, File > Print > PDF > Save as PDF | Partly |
| On any computer | HEIC to PDF in the browser: drop the photos, pick a quality and page size | Yes, with the size shown first |
On the iPhone: the Files app
This works without installing anything (steps from Apple's iPhone User Guide):
- In Photos, select the photos, tap the Share button and choose Save to Files. Pick a folder, for example On My iPhone.
- Open the Files app and go to that folder.
- Tap Select (or the More button, then Select), tap each photo in the order you want the pages.
- Tap the More button (three dots) at the bottom and choose Create PDF.
The PDF appears in the same folder, ready to attach or upload. It's the fastest route, but you don't choose the page size or the quality, so a handful of full-resolution photos can be too big for an email or a portal. If that happens, send the PDF through a compressor, or build it on a computer where you can choose.
On a Mac: Preview
AirDrop the photos to the Mac or open them from the Photos library, then open them all together in Preview. Drag the thumbnails in the sidebar into page order, select them all, and choose File > Print, then PDF > Save as PDF. The print dialog lets you pick the paper size and whether each photo fills the page, so it's the better route for documents. Preview reads HEIC directly, so there's no conversion step first.
On Windows: why the usual tricks fail with HEIC
For ordinary JPG photos, we've measured the two Windows routes in detail in how to turn photos into a PDF on Windows: the built-in Print to PDF crops and re-compresses, and Chrome's Save as PDF keeps the photo untouched. HEIC changes that picture:
- Chrome can't open HEIC at all. In Chrome 154, a HEIC photo didn't load as an image, the browser's own image decoder rejected it, and opening the file in a tab just downloaded it again. So the Chrome Save as PDF trick isn't available until the photo is converted.
- Windows needs two extensions. Photos and the Print Pictures window can read HEIC only with Microsoft's HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions installed from the Microsoft Store. With both installed, our test PC decoded every HEIC at full size and the right way up. Without the HEVC extension, Windows can't display the photos.
- Even then, Print to PDF crops by default. The Print Pictures window opens with Fit picture to frame ticked, and an iPhone photo is a different shape from a sheet of paper, so the edges are cut off. Untick it before printing.
The simplest way around all three is to do the conversion in the browser: HEIC to PDF decodes HEIC itself (it doesn't need Chrome or Windows to understand the format), turns each photo the right way up, fits it whole on the page, and puts every photo in one PDF. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for IDs and contracts.
How big will the PDF be?
A PDF can't hold HEIC, so every method turns each photo into a JPEG inside the PDF. How large those JPEGs are decides the PDF's size. We made PDFs from the same photos at the three quality settings of our converter, on Letter pages:
| Quality | One photo (HEIC 2.67 MB) | One document page (HEIC 2.00 MB) | Five document pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full resolution (4,032 px) | 3.40 MB | 1.73 MB | 8.62 MB |
| Print (up to 3,000 px) | 1.57 MB | 658 KB | 3.29 MB |
| Email (up to 1,600 px) | 386 KB | 220 KB | 1.10 MB |
Three things stand out. At full resolution the PDF saves almost nothing, because JPEG needs more space than HEIC for the same picture: the scene photo grew from 2.67 MB to 3.40 MB, and five document pages went from 10.0 MB of HEIC to 8.62 MB of PDF. Print quality, at about 270 to 290 pixels per inch on a full page, cut that to 3.29 MB, and Email to 1.10 MB, small enough for almost any form. And photos of documents compress far better than photos of scenes, because a page is mostly plain paper.
Which to pick: Email for upload portals and attachments, as long as the text is large enough to read when you zoom in on the result; Print for anything that will be printed or read closely; Full resolution only when someone needs to zoom into small details. If a portal has a hard limit, such as 200 KB per file, build the PDF first and then squeeze it with Compress PDF to 200 KB, which lets you set any limit.
Stop the problem at the source
If you often need photos as PDFs or JPGs on a Windows PC, you can make the iPhone save JPG instead of HEIC: Settings > Camera > Formats > Most Compatible. New photos take a little more space on the phone, and the ones you already have stay HEIC. For a batch of existing HEIC photos you need as pictures rather than a PDF, HEIC to JPG converts them all at once.
Checklist before you send it
- Open the PDF and check every page is upright and nothing at the edges is cut off.
- Check the page order, especially if the photos weren't taken in order.
- Look at the file size against the form's limit before you upload, not after it fails.
- For IDs and contracts, prefer a method that doesn't upload the photos to someone else's server.