How to convert JPG to PDF on Windows, Mac and iPhone

Decide on page size, order and margins first

Every method below makes the same three choices for you, whether you notice or not, so it is worth deciding them before you start. The first is the page size. A PDF that will be printed, or handed in to an office, a school or an insurer, usually works best on a standard page: A4 (210 × 297 mm) in most of the world, US Letter (8.5 × 11 inches) in the United States and Canada. A PDF that is only read on a screen can instead have pages exactly the size of each image, which avoids white borders around photos.

The second choice is the order. Most tools put the pages in the order the files were selected or sorted, and sorting by name can be surprising: IMG_10.jpg often comes before IMG_2.jpg. Renaming the files with leading zeros (01, 02, 03) or reordering them in the tool avoids a jumbled document.

The third is how the picture sits on the page. Scaling to fit keeps the whole image and leaves a white border on two sides when the shapes differ. Filling the page crops the edges, which can cut off the bottom line of a receipt or the corner of a form. For documents, always choose a fit option that keeps the whole image, and add a small margin if the PDF will be printed, because many printers cannot print right up to the edge of the paper.

Convert JPG to PDF on Windows with Microsoft Print to PDF

Windows 10 and 11 include a virtual printer called Microsoft Print to PDF. Anything you can print can be "printed" into a PDF file instead of onto paper, and that includes photos. You can start the print from File Explorer or from the Photos app; the menus differ a little between Windows versions and Photos app updates, but the printer is the same.

Watch the option called Fit picture to frame in the classic Print Pictures dialog. When it is on, Windows enlarges the picture until it fills the page and crops whatever sticks out, which is fine for holiday photos but bad for scanned documents. Turn it off to keep the whole image. The layout list on the right also lets you put several small pictures on one page, such as wallet-size prints, but for documents choose Full page photo so you get one image per page.

1. In File Explorer, select the images in the order you want. In Windows 11, right-click them and choose Show more options if Print is not in the first menu, then choose Print.
2. Set the printer to Microsoft Print to PDF and choose the paper size, for example A4 or Letter.
3. Pick Full page photo as the layout and clear Fit picture to frame so nothing is cropped.
4. Click Print, then choose a file name and folder for the PDF and click Save.

Convert JPG to PDF on a Mac with Preview or Finder

Preview, the image and PDF viewer that comes with macOS, can turn several images into one PDF through its print dialog. When you open several images at once, Preview shows them in one window with a sidebar of thumbnails; drag the thumbnails to change the order. File > Export as PDF is handy for a single image, but to combine several images into one document the print route is the reliable one.

In the print dialog you can also set the paper size, the orientation and a scale. Preview usually offers Scale to Fit with a choice between printing the entire image and filling the entire paper; choose the entire image for documents. Finder offers a quicker route on recent versions of macOS: select the images, Control-click them and choose Quick Actions > Create PDF. That creates one PDF with the images in the selection's order but gives you no control over page size or margins.

1. Select the images in Finder and open them together in Preview.
2. Choose View > Thumbnails, select all thumbnails with Command-A and drag them into the order you want.
3. Choose File > Print, set the paper size and choose to scale the entire image to fit.
4. Open the PDF menu at the bottom of the print dialog, choose Save as PDF, then name the file and click Save.

Convert photos to PDF on an iPhone or iPad

iOS has no menu item called Convert to PDF in the Photos app, but its print system produces a PDF that you can save instead of printing. The exact buttons have moved between iOS versions, so treat the steps below as a guide rather than a recipe. In the Photos app, select the photos, tap the share button and choose Print. On the Print Options screen, newer versions of iOS show a share button at the top that shares the whole print job as a PDF. On older versions, pinch outwards on a page preview with two fingers; this opens the PDF in a full-screen view with its own share button.

From that share sheet, choose Save to Files to keep the PDF on the device or in iCloud Drive, or send it straight to Mail or Messages. Recent versions of the Files app have another route: select the images in a folder, tap the More button and choose Create PDF, which places a new PDF next to the images. Either way, iPhone photos are often HEIC rather than JPG; the system converts them while making the PDF, so you do not need to convert them first.

Convert JPG to PDF on the command line with img2pdf

img2pdf is a small open source program, written in Python, that wraps images in a PDF without decoding and re-encoding them. A JPG is copied into the PDF byte for byte, so there is no quality loss at all and the PDF is barely larger than the images. It is available in many Linux package repositories and through pip. By default each page is the size of its image; the pagesize option puts the images on a standard paper size instead.

ImageMagick can also write PDFs with magick *.jpg out.pdf, but it decodes the images and compresses them again, which can cost quality and change the file size. On many Linux distributions its security policy also blocks writing PDF files by default, which shows up as a "not authorized" error. For JPG to PDF, img2pdf is usually the better tool. Remember that the shell sorts *.jpg alphabetically, so name the files with leading zeros or list them in the order you want.

# One PDF with one page per image, JPGs copied without recompression
img2pdf *.jpg -o out.pdf

# The same images on A4 pages
img2pdf --pagesize A4 *.jpg -o out.pdf

# Pick the order yourself
img2pdf cover.jpg page1.jpg page2.jpg -o out.pdf

Convert JPG to PDF in your browser with FileReshape

FileReshape's JPG to PDF page works on any computer or tablet with a modern browser, including Chromebooks and work PCs where you cannot install software. The PDF is put together inside your browser with a PDF library that runs on your own device, so the images are not uploaded. That matters for the kind of pictures people usually turn into PDFs: ID cards, payslips, receipts and medical papers.

You can add JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP images and mix them in one PDF, one image per page. The list shows a thumbnail of each image; use the arrows to change the order or the cross to remove one, and add more files at any time. The page size can be Same as each image, A4 or US Letter. With A4 or Letter, each image is scaled to fit inside the page without being stretched or cropped and centred, and wide images get landscape pages automatically. The margin can be None, Small or Large, which is about 7 mm or 14 mm of white space around the image.

The converter also handles details that often go wrong elsewhere. Phone photos store their rotation as an orientation tag, and the page reads that tag and turns those photos upright before adding them. JPG images that need no rotation are placed in the PDF unchanged, without recompression, and PNG images are stored losslessly. Rotated photos and the other formats are redrawn and saved as high-quality JPG inside the PDF, and WebP and GIF images are flattened onto white. A single image gives a PDF named after it; several images give images.pdf.

Because the images keep their full resolution, the PDF is about as large as the images together. Twenty phone photos of a few megabytes each can easily exceed an email limit, so if you need a small file, shrink the photos first or run the finished PDF through Compress PDF. For iPhone photos in HEIC format, the HEIC to PDF page does the same job and decodes the HEIC files in the browser.

1. Open the JPG to PDF page and drop your images in the box, or click to choose them.
2. Use the arrows to put the images in order, and choose the page size and margin.
3. Click Create PDF and download the file.

Which method should you use?

For a quick PDF of a few photos, the tool built into your system is usually enough: Microsoft Print to PDF on Windows, Preview or Create PDF on a Mac, and the print or Files route on an iPhone. These go through a print pipeline, so they may resample or recompress the images, and the result depends on the paper and scaling options you pick. For many files, or when you need the exact original quality, use img2pdf. When you want control over order, page size and margins without installing anything, or the images are confidential and you do not want them on a server, use a browser tool that works locally. To add the images to an existing PDF afterwards, create a PDF from them and combine both files with Merge PDF.