Turn Phone Photos of Documents into a Clean PDF
Photos of certificates become an A4 PDF with scanner-style clean-up, rotation, page order and size control
Drop photos here
One page per photo, in order. Straighten and clean them up before saving as PDF
Photos are combined into a PDF entirely in your browser and never uploaded anywhere. The Document clean-up whitens the paper and darkens the text the way scanner apps do; Black & white gives the smallest file for text-only pages. Photograph each page flat, in even light, and rotate here if the phone saved it sideways.
About this tool
A photo of a certificate straight off a phone is grey, slightly tilted and 4 MB. A portal wants a PDF, usually white, upright and under 1 or 2 MB. This tool does what a scanner app does after the shutter clicks. It cleans each photo, fits it onto a page and builds one PDF from all the pages in the order you set.
It is meant for the document uploads that every recruitment or admission form asks for. Marksheets, caste and domicile certificates, an ID proof, a signed declaration photographed page by page. Each photo becomes one page.
The PDF is assembled in your browser and the photos are never uploaded. A live preview shows the selected page with the chosen clean-up before you commit.
How to make a PDF from photos
- Photograph each page flat, filling the frame, in even light without a shadow across the paper.
- Drop the photos onto the tool in page order, or add them and then drag rows or use the arrows to reorder.
- Pick a clean-up filter and check the preview; click any row in the Pages list to preview that page.
- Rotate a page that was saved sideways with its rotate button, one quarter turn per click.
- Choose the page size, orientation and margin, and set the JPEG quality for the file size you need.
- Type a file name, click Create PDF, check the page count and size, then download.
Clean-up filters explained
| Filter | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Original | Keeps the photo as taken, apart from rotation and resizing | Photographs or coloured artwork that must not be altered |
| Document | Measures the paper tone from the brightest pixels and stretches the levels so paper turns white and ink turns darker, keeping colour | Certificates with coloured seals, stamps or a blue-ink signature; this is the default |
| Grayscale | Converts each pixel to its brightness and raises the contrast | Printed text on plain paper where colour carries no meaning; smaller file than Document |
| Black & white | Makes every pixel above a brightness threshold white and everything else black | Typed text only; the smallest file, but shading, light stamps and pencil marks disappear |
Page size, orientation and margins
Each photo is scaled to fit inside the page minus the margin, centred, with its proportions kept. A tall photo on a portrait page fills the height; a wide photo is letterboxed unless the orientation changes. Before any of this, a photo's long edge is limited to 2,200 pixels, which is enough for crisp text on A4 and keeps the file reasonable.
- A4: 210 x 297 mm, the size almost every Indian portal expects, and the default
- Letter and Legal: 8.5 x 11 in and 8.5 x 14 in, for forms designed on those sizes
- Fit to photo: the page takes the photo's own proportions, sized as if the photo were a 150 dpi scan, plus the margin
- Orientation: Auto picks landscape when the photo is wider than it is tall; Portrait and Landscape force one. Not offered for Fit to photo
- Margin: None, Small (about 6 mm) or Normal (about 13 mm) of white space around the photo
Controlling the file size
Every page is stored inside the PDF as a JPEG, and the quality slider (40 to 95, default 80) sets how hard that JPEG is compressed. The filter matters as much as the slider. Document keeps colour and so keeps more data; Grayscale drops colour; Black & white leaves only two tones and compresses hardest.
Hypothetical example: five photos of 3.8 MB each, 19 MB in total, are added with the Document filter at 80%. After the long edge is reduced to 2,200 pixels and re-encoded, each page might land around 300 KB, for a PDF of about 1.5 MB. Moving the slider to 65% or switching to Black & white for text-only pages would bring the same five pages under 1 MB. The result panel shows the PDF size beside the size of the photos, so you can adjust and rebuild until it fits the cap.
Lower quality shows first as blotchiness around letters. In practice settings of 70 and above read cleanly for a certificate; go lower only when the cap demands it.
What this tool does not do
It does not crop, straighten or correct perspective. A page photographed at an angle stays at that angle, with the table or floor visible around it, so framing the shot well matters more here than in a scanner app. Most phone cameras have a document mode that crops and squares the page before saving; use it and bring the result here for clean-up and page assembly.
It does not run OCR, so the PDF holds pictures of pages and its text cannot be searched or selected. Only image files are accepted; a PDF cannot be added as a page. Rotation is in quarter turns only.
The PDF's title is set to the file name you type, which some portals display in the upload list.
Frequently asked questions
›How do I get a photo of my certificate under 1 MB as a PDF?
Use the Document filter, keep A4 and a Small margin, and set the quality slider to around 70. Build the PDF and read the size shown. If it is still over, drop the quality further or switch text-only pages to Black & white, which compresses hardest. Fewer pages per PDF also helps, since each page adds its own image.
›Which clean-up should I pick for a certificate with a coloured seal or stamp?
Document. It whitens the paper and darkens the print while keeping the red of a seal or the blue of an ink signature, which a verifier may look for. Grayscale turns the seal grey and Black & white may remove a light stamp entirely, so keep those for plain typed pages.
›Can this replace a scanner app like Adobe Scan or CamScanner?
For the clean-up, page fitting, ordering and PDF building, yes, and without an account or a watermark. It does not detect page edges, crop or straighten a skewed photo, which those apps do. Take the photo squarely, or use the phone camera's document mode for the crop, and do the rest here.
›What does Fit to photo do?
Instead of placing the photo on a fixed A4 or Letter page, it makes the page the same shape as the photo. The page dimensions are worked out as if the photo were a 150 dpi scan, so a 1,650 x 2,200 pixel photo gives a page of 11 x 14.7 inches before margins. Use it for odd-sized items such as a receipt or a long strip; use A4 for certificates.
›Why did my page come out landscape?
Orientation is on Auto by default, which picks landscape whenever the photo is wider than it is tall. A sideways photo of a portrait certificate counts as wide. Rotate that page with its rotate button so the text reads upright, and Auto will then place it on a portrait page. You can also force Portrait for every page.
›Is the text in the PDF searchable or selectable?
No. Each page is a cleaned-up picture of the photo, with no text layer behind it, so a PDF reader cannot search or select the words. Portals that only ask for a readable scan accept this. If selectable text is required, the file needs an OCR step in another tool after it is built.
›What image formats can I add?
JPG, PNG and WebP from a phone or a scanner app, and any other image type your device can display. A PDF cannot be added as a page here; convert its pages to images with the PDF to JPG tool first, then add those. Each image becomes exactly one page of the output.