Someone asks for “a PDF of the signed form” or “all your receipts in one file”, and there’s no scanner in sight. Your phone camera is good enough if you shoot carefully and tidy the pages afterwards.
We’ll follow one example throughout: five receipts from a work trip that must reach the accounts team as one readable PDF under 5 MB. The same steps work for a 2-page worksheet or a 12-page contract.
What you’ll need
- A phone with a camera (iPhone or Android)
- A browser on your phone or computer. The tools below run in the browser, so your documents are processed on your own device rather than on a server
- A plain, dark surface (a desk, black card, even a dark T-shirt) and a window or lamp
1. Shoot the pages so they barely need fixing
- Use soft, even light. Daylight from a window beside you is best. Overhead ceiling lights put your own shadow across the page, so stand slightly to one side. Turn the flash off: on glossy receipts it leaves a glare spot over the numbers.
- Flat surface, dark background. White paper on a dark background gives a clear edge, which makes cropping fast and exact. Long receipts curl, so hold the ends down with two coins or slide the receipt under a clear plastic sleeve.
- Straight on, not at an angle. Hold the phone parallel to the paper, directly above its center. Our Crop Image tool crops rectangles; it doesn’t correct perspective, so a page shot at an angle stays a trapezoid.
- Leave a thin border of background on all sides so you can crop cleanly. Move closer instead of using digital zoom.
- Tap to focus on the text. Check one photo at full size: if you can’t read the smallest line, neither can the recipient.
- One page per photo. For our example: taxi, hotel, two meals and a train ticket. Shoot the faded thermal train ticket twice.
2. Get the photos where you’ll work
You can do everything in your phone’s browser, picking photos straight from the gallery. For a bigger screen, email them to yourself or use a USB cable. Then check the extension:
- iPhone photos are often HEIC, which many Windows apps and websites can’t open. To save future photos as JPG, go to Settings → Camera → Formats → “Most Compatible”.
- Android photos are usually JPG.
Rename the photos in the order you want them to appear, for example 01-taxi.jpg, 02-hotel.jpg, 03-dinner.jpg. That also reveals a missing page early.
3. Crop and straighten each page
Before converting, tidy up any photo that needs it. Both tools work with JPG, PNG and WebP, so convert HEIC files first with HEIC to JPG if you plan to edit them.
- Crop away the background. In Crop Image, choose “Free” as the ratio, then drag the frame and its corners to the edges of the paper. Cropping keeps the original pixels. Leave a hair of margin rather than cutting into the first letter.
- Fix tilted shots. In Rotate & Flip Image, drag the angle slider until the lines of text are level, or use the 90° buttons for a photo that’s on its side. Saving bakes the rotation into the pixels, which matters: phones sometimes store rotation only as a hidden tag, and a photo that looks upright in your gallery can land sideways inside a PDF.
4. Turn the photos into one PDF
Pick the converter that matches your files:
- All HEIC (straight from an iPhone): HEIC to PDF. Each photo is converted to JPG as you add it, so it works even in browsers that can’t display HEIC.
- JPG, PNG or WebP: JPG to PDF. JPG and PNG files go into the PDF as they are, without re-compressing.
- Screenshots of online forms or confirmations: PNG to PDF keeps small text crisp.
- A mix of HEIC and JPG: convert the HEIC files with HEIC to JPG first, then put everything into JPG to PDF.
Then choose the settings:
- Order. Pages follow the order you see. Use the ← and → arrows under each thumbnail to move a page, and ✕ to drop a duplicate shot.
- Page size. “A4” or “Letter” gives a page that prints properly and looks like a normal document. “Same as image” makes each page exactly the size of the photo, which suits a long receipt that would otherwise shrink to a thin strip on an A4 sheet.
- Orientation. “Auto” turns the page sideways for any photo that’s wider than it is tall. For portrait forms, pick “Portrait”.
- Margin. “Small” gives a printed look. Choose “None” if you already cropped tightly.
Click “Convert to PDF”. With several images, the download is named images.pdf, so rename it right away (see the naming tips below).
5. Fix the order and any sideways pages
- Sideways or upside-down page: open it in Rotate PDF, click the page to turn it 90° (click again for 180°), then save. Pages are rotated, not redrawn, so nothing loses quality.
- Pages in the wrong order: Rearrange PDF Pages lets you drag thumbnails into place, or use the arrows on a phone. “Reverse order” is handy when you photographed a stack from the last page up.
- A page you forgot: shoot it, turn it into its own one-page PDF, then combine both files with Merge PDF, putting them in order with the arrows.
6. Make it small enough to send
Phone photos are often several megabytes each, and JPG to PDF doesn’t re-compress them, so a five-receipt PDF can easily pass 15 MB.
Run it through Compress PDF and start with “Recommended”. Scanned and photo-heavy PDFs often shrink by 50–90%. Then zoom in on the smallest print, such as a receipt’s tax line. If it’s fuzzy, go back and use “Light” instead. “Strong” gives the smallest file, but it’s best kept for full-page text in large type.
Compression saves each page as an optimized image. Keep the uncompressed file as your archive copy.
Faded receipts and ink-saving prints: Grayscale PDF offers a “Black & white (high contrast)” tone that can make pale thermal print easier to read, and a grayscale copy saves ink if the recipient prints it. 150 dpi suits most documents; choose 300 dpi for very small print.
7. Optional: copy the text out
When you need to type the amounts into a spreadsheet or quote a clause from a contract, Image to Text (OCR) reads the words from a photo. Feed it the cropped JPG or PNG of a page, one image at a time; it doesn’t read PDFs. Select the languages that actually appear (you can pick several, such as English and Spanish), check the result, then copy it or save it as a .txt file.
Printed text works far better than handwriting. The tool doesn’t make your PDF searchable; it gives you the text separately. The first run downloads the OCR engine and language data (about 2–15 MB per language) once from a public CDN; your image itself isn’t uploaded.
8. Optional: sign before you send
For a lease page, a permission slip or an expense form that needs your signature, open the final PDF in Sign PDF. Draw your signature with a finger or mouse, or type your name in a handwriting style, place it on the line, resize it and add today’s date. It adds a picture of your signature, like ink on paper, which is fine for many everyday forms but isn’t a certificate-based digital signature.
Sign the uncompressed version, then compress the signed file last.
Name files so they’re easy to find later
A good name says what, when and who:
2026-10-trip-receipts-lisbon-5p.pdf2026-11-03-lease-renewal-signed.pdfmath-homework-week-9-mina.pdf
Put the date first (year first, so files sort), and skip spaces and special characters that some upload forms reject.
Common mistakes
- Using the flash on glossy paper, leaving a white spot over the total
- Shooting at an angle and expecting cropping to straighten the page
- White paper on a white desk, so the edges disappear
- Sending the 15 MB original when the form only accepts 5 MB
- Compressing too strongly and making small print unreadable
- Sending
images.pdfinstead of a file name that says what’s inside
FAQ
Are my documents uploaded when I use these tools?
No. Converting, rotating, rearranging, merging, compressing and signing all happen in your browser, so receipts, IDs and contracts stay on your device. Only the OCR tool downloads its engine and language data from a public CDN, and your image still isn’t uploaded.
Is a phone photo good enough to replace a scanner?
For receipts, forms, homework and most contracts, yes, if the light is even, the phone is held straight over the page and you check that the smallest text is readable. For certified copies, ask the recipient first.
Why is one page sideways in my PDF when the photo looked fine?
Phones sometimes record rotation as a hidden tag instead of turning the image itself. Fix the page with Rotate PDF, or straighten the photo with Rotate & Flip Image before converting.
Can I make the PDF text searchable?
Not with these tools. Image to Text extracts the text from a photo so you can copy or save it, but the PDF itself stays a set of images.
