My dad thinks taking a phone photo of a document counts as “saving it digitally.” His gallery is chaos. 400+ photos — electricity bills mixed with selfies mixed with random screenshots of WhatsApp forwards. When the bank asked him to email 6 months of electricity bills as a PDF, he handed me his phone and said “they’re in there somewhere.”
Took me 15 minutes just to find the 6 photos. Then I had to turn them into one PDF. The bank doesn’t want 6 separate JPG files — they want one consolidated PDF. This is my life now.
What I do
I go to convertkr.com/image-to-pdf, throw all the images in, drag them into the right order (oldest bill first), pick A4 size, and hit convert. One PDF comes out. Email it. Done.
The bank accepted it without asking any questions. Looked like a proper scanned document. Nobody could tell it was 6 phone photos taken on a kitchen table with bad lighting.
Page size — the only setting that matters
A4 for anything official. That’s it. That’s the advice.
There’s also Letter size (for US stuff) and Original (where the page is the exact size of the image with no margins). I use Original when I’m making a photo collection or something casual. But 95% of the time it’s A4 because banks, universities, government offices — they all expect A4.
Portrait or landscape — pick whatever your images are. Most document photos are portrait. If you’re converting wide screenshots, switch to landscape.
The order thing almost got me
First time I did this for my dad, I didn’t pay attention to the order. Newest bill ended up as page 1, oldest was page 6. Bank wanted chronological. Had to redo the whole thing. Now I always arrange oldest-first before converting.
Phone photos are the worst for ordering because they’re named IMG_20260315_142756 and your brain can’t sort those numbers while looking at thumbnails. I just look at the date on the actual bill in the thumbnail to figure out the order. Takes an extra 30 seconds but saves having to redo it.
Real talk — compress before converting
Each phone photo is like 4-5MB. Six photos = 30MB PDF. Can’t email that. Most email services cap at 25MB.
So now my workflow for dad’s bills is: compress each photo first (brings them down to 300-400KB each), THEN convert to PDF. Final PDF ends up around 2-3MB. Easy to email, looks the same.
Could I also just compress the PDF after? Yeah. But compressing the images first gives better results in my experience. The PDF compressor re-renders pages as JPG which sometimes messes with the look. Compressing the source images keeps them cleaner.
Who else I’ve done this for
Besides my dad (who I do this for basically every month now):
My brother — handwritten assignments during COVID online classes. Teacher said “submit as PDF not photos.” He’d write 8 pages by hand, photograph each page, I’d convert to PDF. This went on for 3 months until I taught him to do it himself. He still messages me sometimes when he’s “too lazy to figure it out.”
A freelancer friend — receipt photos for client expense reports. He used to attach 15-20 separate images to an email. His client told him to stop doing that. Now he converts them all into one “Expenses.pdf” and sends one attachment. Apparently his clients started responding faster after that. Go figure.
A photographer friend — wanted a quick portfolio PDF to email to clients. 20 of his best shots, one per page, no margins. I used the “Original” page size so each image filled the whole page like a photo book. He’s been using that same PDF for over a year.
My neighbor — her daughter’s school admission required “all documents in one PDF.” She had CNIC photos, birth certificate photo, vaccination card photo — all as phone images. Converted them to one PDF in 2 minutes. The school accepted it no problem.
A few things I figured out
If your photo is crooked — like the document is at an angle in the frame — fix that BEFORE converting. The PDF doesn’t straighten anything. It puts the image on the page exactly as it is. A crooked photo becomes a crooked PDF page. Crop it first to at least remove the edges of the table or whatever is showing.
If the photo is dark or low contrast, there’s nothing the PDF converter can do about that either. Try retaking the photo near a window. Good lighting fixes most problems. I learned this after converting 8 photos my dad took under a tubelight at night. The PDFs were readable but barely.
Keep the originals. Every time. The photos stay in your gallery and the PDF is a new file. But I’ve had someone delete their photos after converting because they thought the PDF was “the same thing.” It’s not. The PDF is compressed. If you ever need the full resolution image again, you need the original.
FAQ
Can I mix JPG and PNG images in one PDF?
Yeah. Throw in whatever formats you have. They all end up as pages in the same PDF.
How many images can I convert at once?
I’ve done 30+ without issues. If you’re going above 50 heavy images, your browser might struggle a bit. Just do them in two batches and merge the PDFs after.
Can I add page numbers after converting?
Yep. Convert to PDF first, then run it through the page numbers tool. That’s what I do for my dad’s bill PDFs — convert, then add “Page 1 of 6” at the bottom. Looks official.
Need to turn photos into a PDF? Open the converter — drop your images in and go.