How to convert HEIC to PDF
- Drop your HEIC files into the box above, or click to browse. You can also paste with Ctrl+V.
- Adjust quality or resizing under Conversion settings if you need to. The defaults suit most photos.
- Conversion starts automatically and runs on your device — watch the progress bar for each file.
- Download files individually, or grab everything as a ZIP.
What changes when you convert HEIC to PDF
This conversion exists because of a specific, very common situation: you photographed a document with your phone, and something official now wants a PDF. Visa applications, insurance claims, expense systems, university admissions, tax filings — almost all of them ask for PDF and reject images.
Two conversions happen in one step. The HEIC is decoded, then re-encoded as JPEG to go inside the PDF, because PDF supports JPEG natively and every viewer decodes it instantly. That second encode is a genuine generation of loss on top of the compression your camera already applied. For a photograph of a document it is entirely invisible at quality 82; for anything you intend to print at high quality, be aware it happened.
Page geometry works the way it does elsewhere on this site: the page is sized to the image so nothing is cropped or letterboxed. A 3024 × 4032 photo becomes a 3024 × 4032 point page — around 107 × 142 cm on paper. That sounds absurd, but every viewer scales it to the screen and every printer scales it to the sheet, and the alternative would mean either cropping your document or surrounding it with margins.
Metadata does not survive. PDF has its own document-level metadata and does not adopt the image's EXIF, so the camera model, the capture date and the GPS coordinates are dropped. When you are sending a photograph of your passport to an agency, losing the GPS tag is a feature rather than a loss.
For photographing documents specifically, one practical note that matters more than any setting: fill the frame with the page, shoot straight on rather than at an angle, and use even light. No conversion setting fixes a photo taken at 30 degrees in a dim room.
What is preserved
- The full resolution of the photo; the page is sized to match it exactly
- Visual quality, at the JPEG quality used to embed the image inside the document
- Orientation, applied rather than left as a metadata flag for the viewer to interpret
What is lost
- EXIF metadata including camera model, capture date and GPS coordinates
- HDR gain maps, depth maps and portrait segmentation from the HEIC container
- 10-bit colour depth, reduced to 8-bit
- The image as an editable photo — it becomes a picture inside a document
What is altered
- The page is measured in points at 72 dpi, so a 12 MP photo makes a very large page rather than an A4 one
- The photo is re-encoded as JPEG on the way into the PDF, which is a second generation of lossy compression
PDF support in browsers and operating systems
Checked on 2026-08-10. We re-verify this table every quarter.
| Platform | Support |
|---|---|
| Chrome | built-in PDF viewer since 2010 |
| Safari | built-in, all versions |
| Firefox | built-in pdf.js viewer since Firefox 19 |
| Edge | built-in, default PDF handler on Windows |
| iOS | Files, Mail, Safari and Books open PDFs natively |
| Android | Google Drive viewer preinstalled on most devices |
| Windows | Edge handles PDFs out of the box |
| macOS | Preview, all versions |
When not to convert HEIC to PDF
Do not use this page if you need several photos in one document — the PDF builder does that, with page ordering and a choice of A4 or fit-to-image. It is the right tool when you are photographing a multi-page document.
Do not convert if the recipient asked for a photo. Sending a PDF when someone wanted an image makes their life harder — they have to extract it, and what they get is whatever quality was embedded.
Do not convert for the web. Browsers download PDFs rather than displaying them inline, and the file is larger than a JPG or WebP of the same photo.
Do not expect the text in a photographed document to be searchable. The PDF contains a picture of the page, not the words on it — that needs OCR.
Frequently asked questions
Why does an agency want PDF instead of a photo?
Because PDF is a document format with a fixed, predictable layout that prints identically everywhere, and because most submission systems are built around it. The image inside is the same photograph either way — the wrapper is what their workflow expects.
Is the text in my photographed document searchable?
No. The PDF contains a picture of the page, so nothing is selectable or searchable even though the words are plainly visible. Making it searchable needs OCR, which recognises the characters and adds an invisible text layer behind the image.
Can I put several photos into one PDF?
Yes, with the PDF builder. It accepts HEIC alongside every other format, lets you set the page order, and produces one document — which is usually what an agency asking for a scanned document actually wants.
Does the PDF still contain my location data?
No. EXIF, including GPS coordinates, is not carried into the PDF — the document has its own metadata system and does not adopt the image's. For sending a photographed document to a third party, that is usually exactly what you want.
What quality should I use for a document photo?
The default of 82 is right for almost everything: text stays crisply legible and the file stays a reasonable size for an email attachment. Raise it to 95 only if the document will be printed and inspected closely; 70 is still readable and roughly a third the size if an upload limit is tight.