Turn photos and scans into one tidy PDF

Phones have replaced scanners for most purposes, which means the documents people actually need to send now arrive as a folder of photographs. Expenses, signed forms, proof of address, delivery notes. Individually they are fine. Sent as eleven separate images, they are an inconvenience for whoever receives them and a good way to have one of them overlooked.

One PDF fixes the practical part: the order is fixed, the pages stay together, nothing gets lost between messages, and the person at the other end can print it without assembling anything. Most systems that accept a document at all accept a PDF, and many will not take a folder of images.

It is worth thinking about what is in those photographs before they go anywhere. A photographed document carries whatever was on the desk around it, and a phone photograph carries the metadata described elsewhere on this site: where it was taken, when, and on whose device. A receipt photographed at home comes with your home. If the PDF is going outside the organisation, that is worth a look first.

Two habits improve the result more than any setting. Crop before combining, because a page that is eighty percent desk is harder to read and much larger than it needs to be. And check the order once at the end: an out of order set of pages is the most common complaint about documents assembled this way, and it costs one glance to avoid.

Size is the other thing that catches people out. Photographs are large, and eleven of them combined can produce a file too big for the email or the portal it is destined for. Reducing the images before combining is more effective than compressing the PDF afterwards, and does less damage to how it reads.

It all happens in your browser. No upload, no account, and nothing kept, which for a stack of photographed documents is the only sensible arrangement.