You have a few photos, of a receipt, a signed page or a set of pictures, and a form wants one PDF. Almost every guide gives the same answer for Windows: right-click the picture, choose Print, pick Microsoft Print to PDF, save. It is built in and it works, in the sense that you get a PDF.
We wanted to know what that PDF actually contains, so we ran three photos through it on a Windows 11 PC, with the settings the dialog opens with, and took the files apart. Then we did the same with Chrome’s Save as PDF and with the JPG to PDF tool on this site.
What the Windows print route did to our photos
Right-click → Print opens the Print Pictures window. It opens on a full-page layout with Fit picture to frame ticked, on your default paper size (A4 on our PC). Here is what came out:
| Photo | What happened | File size |
|---|---|---|
| Landscape, 4:3 (a normal camera photo) | Filled the page edge to edge; 5.7% cut off at the top and bottom | 1.59 MB → 1.09 MB |
| Widescreen, 16:9 | 20.5% cut off, a tenth from each side | 1.21 MB → 0.85 MB |
| Portrait, 3:4 (a phone held upright, a page of a document) | Put on a landscape page, turned on its side, and 5.7% cut off | 0.92 MB → 0.63 MB |
Two things are going on. First, the full-page layout fills the whole sheet, and an A4 page is a longer shape than most photos, so whatever sticks out is trimmed. On a photographed document that trimmed strip can be the letterhead or the signature line. Second, the PDF does not contain your photo. Windows draws the picture again at printer resolution and the PDF printer stores that drawing as new JPEG strips. That is why the files got smaller: the photo was re-compressed, not copied. Measured against the original, the re-drawn picture scored 35.5 dB, a mild loss you would mostly see on fine detail when you zoom in.
Fixing it inside Windows
Untick Fit picture to frame in the Print Pictures window before you press Print. In our tests that stopped the cropping completely: the widescreen photo came out whole, with white bands above and below. It did not change the other two things. The portrait photo was still printed on its side, and every photo was still re-compressed.
So the built-in route is fine for a single landscape picture you just want to look at. For documents, portrait photos, or anything a reviewer needs to read closely, one of the next two ways is better.
Chrome: Save as PDF keeps the photo untouched
- Drag the photo into a Chrome window, or right-click it and choose Open with → Google Chrome.
- Press Ctrl + P, set Destination to Save as PDF.
- Check the preview, then Save.
In all three of our tests the PDF held the original photo byte for byte: the same JPEG data that was in the file, nothing re-compressed, nothing cut off, portrait photos upright. Edge is built on the same engine, but we only tested Chrome. Two limits: you get one PDF per photo, and the size of the photo on the page changed with the browser window in our runs, so look at the preview before saving. To join several of those PDFs afterwards, use Merge PDF.
Several photos into one PDF, unchanged
This is what JPG to PDF on this site is for. It runs in your browser and the photos are not uploaded.
- Drop all the photos onto the page. PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP work too.
- Put them in order with the arrows or by dragging, or use Sort by name if your files are numbered.
- Choose A4 or US Letter, keep Orientation: Match each image, and pick a margin. Small is enough for most printers.
- Leave Output on One PDF with every image and press Create PDF.
With the same three photos, each PDF contained the original JPEG byte for byte and came out about 1 KB larger than the photo itself. Nothing was cropped, the portrait photo got a portrait page, and the landscape ones got landscape pages. Every image is placed whole and centred; if its shape differs from the page, you get white space on two sides instead of a trimmed edge.
Which way to use
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| One landscape photo, to view on screen, nothing to install | Right-click → Print → Microsoft Print to PDF, with Fit picture to frame unticked |
| One photo, exactly as it is | Chrome → Ctrl+P → Save as PDF |
| Several photos or document pages in one PDF, in order | JPG to PDF |
| Pages already in separate PDFs | Merge PDF |
If the PDF is too big for the form
Keeping the original photos means the PDF weighs about as much as the photos together. Phone photos are often 2–5 MB each, so a few pages can pass an upload limit. Shrink the photos first with Compress Image to Target Size, look at the result, then build the PDF. You see the quality you are getting before it is locked inside the file. If you already have the PDF, Compress PDF does the same job afterwards. Why photo PDFs shrink so much more than text PDFs is explained in where a PDF’s file size comes from.
How we tested. On 30 September 2026, on Windows 11 with the built-in Microsoft Print to PDF printer, printing through the Print Pictures window with the settings it opened with, and once more with Fit picture to frame unticked. Chrome 154’s PDF engine and our JPG to PDF tool on A4. The photo was a 2048 × 1536 landscape (“Track on Fremington Edge”, Kreuzschnabel, CC BY-SA 3.0) plus 16:9 and 3:4 crops of it. We read each PDF’s images and page layout directly. The Windows Photos app has its own print dialog, which we did not test here.
