How to Combine Photos Into One PDF on Your Phone

You have eight photos — receipts for an expense claim, pictures of a damaged parcel, screenshots of a conversation — and the person on the other end wants one PDF, not eight attachments.

Both iPhone and Android can do this with nothing installed. The iPhone method is genuinely hidden, which is why most people end up downloading an app they did not need.

On iPhone

Two built-in routes. The Files app one is the official method; the Print one is faster.

The Files app Create PDF command

Cleanest if the photos are already saved as files.

1. Open Photos, select the images you want, tap the share icon, then Save to Files. Choose a folder — make a new one, it keeps things tidy.
2. Open Files and go to that folder.
3. Tap Select, then tap each image in the order you want, then ⋯ at the bottom right.
4. Choose Create PDF.

A PDF appears in the same folder, named after the first image. One image per page, sized to the page.

A caveat worth knowing: with a single image selected, Create PDF produces a one-page PDF. With multiple images selected, the page order follows the folder’s current sort order rather than your tap order. Sort the folder by name and name the files so they sort correctly.

The Print pinch trick

Faster, works straight from Photos, and is the one almost nobody knows about.

1. Open Photos and select your images.
2. Tap the share icon.
3. Scroll down and tap Print.
4. The print preview appears. Pinch outward with two fingers on the page thumbnail, as if zooming into a photo.
5. The preview opens as a full PDF.
6. Tap the share icon in the top corner to save it to Files, email it, or send it through any app.

You do not need a printer connected. iOS builds a PDF to send to the printer, and the pinch simply intercepts it before it goes anywhere.

This gesture has worked across many iOS releases but it has never been documented, so it can behave slightly differently between versions. If pinching does nothing, use the Files method instead.

On Android

Print to PDF

The equivalent route, and it is a documented feature rather than a hidden one.

1. Open Google Photos or your gallery app and select the images.
2. Tap the share icon, then look for Print — it may be under a “more” option depending on the app.
3. In the print dialog, tap the printer dropdown at the top and choose Save as PDF.
4. Set Paper size and Orientation if you want control over the layout.
5. Tap the PDF/download button and choose where to save it.

Some gallery apps only print one image at a time. If yours does, use the Files app (Files by Google, or your manufacturer’s file manager), select the images there, and print from the file manager instead.

Google Drive

Works, with a caveat.

Upload the images to Drive, select them, and look for a PDF option. Drive’s behaviour here has shifted between versions — on some it combines selected images into one PDF, on others it handles them one at a time. If Drive does not offer what you need, Print to PDF is the more reliable route on Android.

Getting the page order right

This is where most attempts go wrong. Neither platform reliably uses the order you tapped the images. They use the order the files are passed through, which is normally filename or date order.

The fix is to rename before you start:

• 01-receipt-train.jpg
• 02-receipt-hotel.jpg
• 03-receipt-taxi.jpg

Numbering with a leading zero matters once you pass nine files — 10 sorts before 2 otherwise, which produces an order that looks almost right and is not.

On iPhone, rename in the Files app: long-press a file, tap Rename. On Android, long-press in the Files app and choose Rename.

Once numbered, sort the folder by name and the resulting PDF comes out in order. Always open the finished PDF and flip through before sending — fixing the order afterwards means starting over.

Keeping the size down

This is the other common problem. Phone photos are 3–5MB each, and a PDF embeds them unchanged. Eight photos becomes a 30MB PDF that will not attach to an email.

Three ways to handle it:

Compress the images first. Our image compressor runs in your browser, including on a phone. Resize to about 1600px on the long edge and 80% quality, then combine. This gives the best-looking result because each image is resized once from the original.

Compress the PDF afterwards. If the PDF already exists, our PDF compressor downsamples the embedded images. Slightly worse than compressing first, because the images get re-encoded twice, but much quicker.

Use scanner mode instead, if the photos are of documents. More on that below.

Myths and mistakes

• “I need an app for this.” You do not, on either platform. The app store PDF converters are mostly wrappers around the same OS print-to-PDF function, with adverts, watermarks on the free tier, and in many cases an upload of your images to their server.
• “Selection order sets the page order.” It usually does not. Rename and sort.
• “Print to PDF needs a printer.” It does not. The PDF is generated locally and no print job is ever sent.
• “Combining photos is the same as scanning.” It is not, and this is the big one. A photo of a document keeps the perspective distortion, the shadows, the surrounding table and the full camera resolution. A scanner mode crops to the page edges, corrects the geometry, flattens the lighting and saves roughly 200KB per page instead of 4MB.
• “Higher resolution is safer for a submission.” For receipts and screenshots, no. A 1600px-wide image is more than enough to read any receipt, and a 30MB PDF that bounces off an attachment limit helps nobody.

When to scan instead

If the photos are of paper — forms, letters, receipts you need to be legible, anything official — do not combine photos at all. Use the document scanner:

• iPhone: Notes → camera icon → Scan Documents, or Files → ⋯ → Scan Documents.
• Android: Google Drive → + → Scan, or your phone’s built-in scanner.

It produces a multi-page PDF directly, in order, cropped and straightened, at a fraction of the size. The full walkthrough is in scan documents to PDF with your phone.

Combining photos is the right tool for images that are genuinely images — screenshots, product photos, pictures of damage. For documents, scan.

Checking the result

Before you send it:

1. Open the PDF and flip through every page. Confirm the order and that nothing is missing or duplicated.
2. Check the orientation. Photos taken in portrait sometimes land sideways on a landscape page.
3. Check the file size against wherever it is going. Under 10MB is safe for almost any email; upload forms are often far stricter.
4. Check anything that needs to be read — a receipt total, a reference number — at 100% zoom rather than fit-to-width.

If the size is the problem, see compress a PDF to under 1MB or 200KB for how to hit a specific target.