A4, Letter or fit to image: which page size?
Each image is scaled to fit inside the margins, centred, never cropped or stretched. The page size decides how the PDF prints.
- A4 (210 × 297 mm) is standard in most of the world, including Europe, India and Australia.
- US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is used in the United States and Canada. It is a little wider and shorter than A4.
- Fit to image gives every page the shape of its picture, with no white bands. It suits screenshots and photo sets read on screen. Size is worked out at 96 pixels per inch, so a 1920 × 1080 screenshot becomes a 20 × 11.25 inch page.
With Auto orientation, landscape photos get landscape pages and portrait photos portrait pages, so nothing ends up tiny in the middle of a sheet. Force Portrait or Landscape if you want every page the same way. The small margin (about 6 mm) keeps content clear of the edge many home printers cannot reach. The large margin (about 19 mm) leaves room for hole punching.
Getting a PDF under 1 MB, 500 KB or 200 KB
Job portals, universities and government forms often accept only small PDFs, while a single phone photo is usually 2–5 MB. Choose a maximum size and the tool does the rest.
It first tries every page at 92% JPEG quality. If the PDF is too big, it searches for the highest quality that fits. Only when quality would drop below 30% does it shrink the pixel dimensions too, because very low quality turns text blocky. The result shows the exact size in bytes and the quality used.
- Crop away table tops and background before adding a document photo, so more of the budget goes to the text.
- As a rough guide, allow 100–150 KB per page for a clearly readable A4 document photo.
- Limits are decimal: "under 500 KB" means at most 500,000 bytes, which passes whether a site counts 1 KB as 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.
Already have a PDF that is too large? Use Compress PDF. For single photos, the image compressor works the same way.
Sideways photos and other common problems
Phones often save a photo the way the sensor sees it and add an EXIF orientation tag telling apps to turn it upright. Converters that ignore the tag produce sideways pages. This tool reads it, and the thumbnail shows exactly how each page will look. If a scan really was taken upside down, press ⟳ twice.
iPhone HEIC photos cannot be read by most browsers, so they are rejected with a message. Convert them with the HEIC to JPG converter first.
Transparent PNGs keep their transparency and appear on white paper. Huge scans are fine without a size limit, because the original data is copied straight in. Several PDFs to combine? Use Merge PDF instead.