Why HEIC photos have to change to go into a PDF
iPhones save photos as HEIC, a compact format that much of Windows, many upload forms and most PDF software still don't understand. A PDF can hold JPEG and lossless images, but not HEIC. So every HEIC-to-PDF converter, this one included, turns each photo into a JPEG on the way in. The only real question is how large those JPEGs should be, because that decides whether the PDF is 300 KB or 3 MB per page.
Most converters make that choice for you and don't tell you what it was. Here you choose, and the result shows the PDF's size before you download, so you can switch and try again.
Choosing the quality: what we measured
We converted a 12-megapixel test photo and a photo of a printed document, both iPhone-sized HEIC files (4032 × 3024 pixels), onto Letter pages at each setting, then read the PDFs back with an independent PDF library:
| Setting | Photo inside the PDF | Photo (HEIC 2.67 MB) | Document (HEIC 2.00 MB) | Five document pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Print (default) | up to 3,000 px, JPEG 85 | 1.57 MB | 658 KB | 3.29 MB |
| Full resolution | 4,032 px, JPEG 92 | 3.40 MB | 1.73 MB | 8.62 MB |
| up to 1,600 px, JPEG 75 | 386 KB | 220 KB | 1.10 MB |
Print gives each photo about 270 to 290 pixels per inch on a full Letter or A4 page, which is sharp printed and on any screen, at roughly a third of the full-resolution size for documents. Full resolution keeps every pixel, for photos someone will zoom into or print large. Email is for attachments and upload portals with a limit: five pages of documents came to 1.10 MB, and text stays easy to read on screen. In every case the image in the PDF matched the decoded HEIC almost exactly (an average difference below 1 on a 0–255 scale), so the only change is the resolution you picked.
Several photos into one PDF
Drop all the photos at once: receipts for an expense claim, the pages of a signed form, ID
photos for an application. Each becomes one page, in the order you set; drag the handle or
use the arrows to rearrange, or Sort by name to follow the iPhone's
IMG_ numbering. Choose One PDF per photo if each one
must be uploaded on its own, and download them together as a ZIP.
Page size, margins and sideways photos
Pick US Letter or A4 to print or to match what a form expects (the default follows your browser's region), or Same size as each photo for a PDF that's just the pictures. Every photo is fitted whole, never cropped, and centred inside the margin.
iPhones often store a photo sideways with a note saying which way is up. Converters that ignore the note produce sideways pages. Here it's applied as each photo is decoded: in our test, a photo stored sideways with a rotation note came out landscape on a landscape page, matching the original. With orientation set to Match each photo, portrait shots get portrait pages and landscape shots landscape pages.
JPG, PNG and screenshots in the same PDF
Not everything on a phone is HEIC: screenshots are PNG, and photos received in messages are usually JPG. Mix them in freely. JPG and PNG files go into the PDF exactly as they are, without being compressed again, just as in JPG to PDF. If you need the photos as images rather than a PDF, use HEIC to JPG. If the PDF must be under a limit, compress it to a target size.
Doing it on the iPhone itself
The iPhone can make a PDF without an app: save the photos to the Files app, select them there, and choose Create PDF from the More menu. It's quick, but you can't choose the page size or how big the file gets, so a handful of pages can be too big to email. This converter runs in Safari on the iPhone too.
Your photos stay on your device
Photos of IDs, contracts and receipts are exactly what you shouldn't upload to a random website. Here the HEIC decoder and the PDF builder both run in your browser, so nothing is sent anywhere. There's no account, no watermark and no limit on the number of photos.