PNG to PDF

Turning PNG files into a document

PNG is what screenshots are, which makes this the common way to turn a series of captures into a single document. PNG has no JPEG-style compression, so images are encoded as they go into the PDF; expect the result to be smaller than the sum of the PNGs.

Order and page size

Images become pages in the order shown in the list, and the arrows move them. This matters more than people expect: drop in a folder of scans and they arrive in whatever order the operating system offers, which is rarely the order you photographed them.

"Fit" makes each page exactly the shape of its image, which is right for photographs and screenshots. Choosing A4 or Letter instead places each image centred on a standard sheet — the option to use when the result will be printed or submitted to a form that expects a paper size.

It runs on your device

Under 40 MB the whole job happens in your browser, so the photographs never leave your phone or laptop. That matters here more than in most conversions, because the images people turn into PDFs are usually identity documents, receipts and signed forms.

If the PDF comes out large

It will be roughly the size of the images that went in, because a PDF is a container rather than a compressor. Phone photos are big, so ten of them make a big PDF. Run the result through Compress PDF, or if a form has given you a hard limit, compress to that exact size.

Making it searchable

A PDF built from photographs contains pictures of text, not text — so it cannot be searched or copied from. That is a property of every image-to-PDF conversion, not a shortcoming of this one. Making it searchable requires OCR, which recognises characters in the image and adds a text layer behind them.