Scanning rarely produces one tidy file. A phone gives you a photo per page, a desktop scanner may give you a multi-page TIFF or a separate PDF per sheet, and a printer's scan-to-email feature sends whatever it feels like. Whoever is receiving the document — a landlord, an HR department, a court clerk — wants a single PDF with the pages in order. This guide covers the three cases and how to get from each to one file.
First, work out what your scanner gave you
| What you have | Typical source | Tool to use |
|---|---|---|
| One photo per page (.jpg / .jpeg) | Phone camera, "scan" apps that save images | JPG to PDF |
| Screenshots or exported images (.png) | Screen captures, some scanner apps | PNG to PDF |
| One .tif / .tiff file with many pages | Office scanners, fax machines, archive exports | TIFF to PDF |
| Several separate .pdf files | Scan-to-PDF, the Notes app scanner, printer email scans | Merge PDF |
Every tool above runs inside your browser: the scans are never uploaded to a server, no account is required, and the output has no watermark. Each accepts up to 20 files per batch, each file up to 200 MB.
Before you start: rotate and name the pages
Two minutes of preparation saves a re-do later.
- Rotate sideways pages now. The converters place each image on the page exactly as it is; they do not auto-rotate. Fix orientation in the Photos app on a phone or any image viewer on a computer.
- Name files in page order on a computer.
01-cover.jpg,02-page.jpg, and so on sort correctly in the file picker, so they arrive in the tool already in order. Note that10sorts before2unless you zero-pad. - Crop obvious junk. A photo that shows half the desk still converts fine, but the page will contain the desk. Cropping is optional; rotating is not.
Case 1: photos of pages from a phone
- Open the JPG to PDF tool in Safari or Chrome on the phone.
- Tap Upload files and choose the photos. iPhones store photos as HEIC by default, but when you pick them from the Photo Library in Safari they are handed to the page as JPEG, so no export step is needed. If you received a
.heicfile some other way, save it as JPG first. - Tap Reorder and drag the photos into page order. The list order is the page order.
- Tap Convert, then Download. Each photo becomes one page, at its original resolution, on a Letter-size page.
If the document is long, converting it in two or three batches and then merging the results is fine; the Merge PDF tool copies pages without recompressing them, so there is no quality cost to the second step.
Case 2: a multi-page TIFF from a scanner or fax
Office scanners and fax software often deliver a single .tif file that contains every page. Most phones and browsers cannot open it, which is why the recipient asks for a PDF.
- Open the TIFF to PDF tool and add the file.
- Click Convert. Every page inside the TIFF becomes its own PDF page, in the original order, at its original pixel dimensions.
- If you have several TIFFs — say one per chapter — add them all in one batch, in order, and the pages of each file follow the pages of the previous one.
Case 3: separate PDF scans
Scan-to-PDF from a printer, the document scanner in the iPhone Notes app, and most desktop scanner software produce a PDF per scan. This is the easiest case.
- Open the Merge PDF tool and add the PDFs.
- Drag them into order. If one scan includes a blank back page you want to drop, turn off All pages for that file and enter the range to keep.
- Click Merge, then View to flip through the result before you download it.
Mixed sources: photos plus PDFs
Merge PDF accepts PDF files only, so convert the photos first (Case 1), then merge that PDF with the others (Case 3). Because both steps run in your browser and nothing is recompressed during the merge, the two-step route produces exactly the same pages as a one-step tool would.
What you will not get from this workflow
- Searchable text. Image-to-PDF conversion keeps pages as images. Making them searchable requires OCR, which is a separate step in a dedicated OCR application.
- Automatic cropping or de-skewing. Pages are used as scanned. Straighten and crop in a photo app first if it matters.
- Smaller files. JPG photos are embedded as-is, so the PDF is roughly the sum of the photo sizes. To shrink the result, reduce the photo resolution before converting; 1,500–2,000 pixels on the long edge is plenty for readable text.
For a closer look at which image format gives the sharpest, smallest result for scanned text, see JPG vs PNG to PDF.