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2 min read

How to Convert Photos to a PDF on Android

  • PDF
  • Android
  • How-to

Many forms and offices want a document as a PDF, but what you have is a handful of photos on your phone. Turning them into one tidy PDF is quick — as long as the photos are taken and prepared properly first. Otherwise you end up with a crooked, shadowy, 20 MB file that nobody can read or upload.

Here is a simple process that produces a clear, reasonably small PDF straight from your phone.

Step 1: Take good photos of each page

Quality in, quality out. A few seconds of care here saves a lot of fixing later:

  • Lay the page flat on a plain, contrasting surface.
  • Use even light and avoid casting your own shadow across the page.
  • Hold the phone directly above the page so the edges are parallel to the frame.
  • Fill the frame with the page, and tap to focus before you shoot.

Step 2: Crop each image

Crop out the table and anything else around the page. This removes distracting background and makes the page fill the PDF sheet.

Step 3: Resize so the PDF stays small

Unprocessed phone photos are huge, and a PDF made from several of them can be enormous. For a standard A4 page, an image around 1600–2400 pixels on the long edge is enough to keep ordinary printed text readable. Resizing before converting is the single most effective way to keep the PDF small. If the destination has a size limit, see our guide to compressing an image to a target size.

Step 4: Put the pages in order and convert

Arrange the images in the order the pages should appear, then convert them into a single PDF. Check the first and last page before you finish — a missing or upside-down page is much easier to fix now than after it has been submitted.

Step 5: Check the result

  1. Open the PDF and scroll through every page.
  2. Zoom in on small print to confirm it is legible.
  3. Check the file size against any upload limit.
  4. If it is too large, go back to step 3 and use smaller images.

A note on privacy

Documents often contain sensitive details: ID numbers, addresses, signatures. Many online PDF converters work by uploading your pages to a server. Where you can, prefer a tool that does the work on your own device.

ResizeKit is our Android app that crops, resizes, compresses and converts images and turns them into PDFs, all on your phone — no account and no uploads. You can read how it handles data on the ResizeKit page.

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