How to convert JPG to PDF
- Drop your JPG 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 JPG to PDF
Almost nothing changes, and that is the point worth understanding about this particular conversion.
PDF supports JPEG natively as an embedded object type. That means a JPG does not have to be decoded into pixels and re-encoded to go inside a PDF — the original compressed bytes can be copied straight into the document. This tool takes that path whenever you are not resizing: your image data arrives in the PDF exactly as it left your camera or editor, with no second generation of lossy compression and no quality setting involved at all.
You can verify this from the file sizes. A PDF built this way is the size of the source JPG plus roughly a kilobyte or two of document structure. If a converter produces a PDF noticeably smaller than your JPG, it decoded and re-compressed the image, and you have quietly lost a generation of quality.
The one thing that genuinely changes is geometry. PDF measures pages in points, at 72 points to the inch, and the page here is sized to match the image one for one. A 3000 × 2000 pixel photo therefore produces a page about 106 × 71 cm. That reads as absurd until you consider the alternative: forcing A4 would either crop the photo or surround it with white margins, and neither is what someone converting a single image wants. Every viewer scales the page to the screen, and every printer scales it to the paper.
Metadata does not survive. PDF has its own document-level metadata system and does not adopt the image's EXIF, so camera settings, capture date and GPS coordinates are dropped. For sharing that is usually welcome; if you need the shooting data, keep the JPG alongside.
If you do resize the image, the fast path is not available — changing the geometry requires decoding, and the image is re-encoded on the way into the document.
What is preserved
- The JPEG data itself, byte for byte — there is no second round of compression
- Exact pixel dimensions; the page is sized to match the image
- Image quality, completely: the output is the input, in a document wrapper
What is lost
- EXIF metadata: camera model, capture date and GPS are not carried into the PDF
- ICC colour profiles beyond sRGB are not mapped into the PDF colour space
- Nothing else — no pixel data is discarded
What is altered
- The page is measured in points at 72 dpi, so a 3000 px wide image makes a 3000 pt page rather than an A4 one
- The image becomes a picture inside a document: no longer directly editable as an image
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 JPG to PDF
Do not use this page if you need several images in one document — the PDF builder does that, with page ordering and a choice of A4 or fit-to-image. The trade is that the builder re-encodes each image, where this page copies the original bytes untouched.
Do not convert for the web. Browsers usually download PDFs rather than showing them inline, search engines index them far worse than a real page, and the file is larger than a WebP or AVIF of the same image.
Do not convert if the recipient wants a photo. Sending a PDF when someone asked for a picture makes their life harder — they have to extract it again, and what they get back is whatever quality was embedded.
Do not expect a specific paper size. This tool deliberately sizes the page to the image, which is right for a scan or a screenshot and wrong for a document meant to print on A4 with margins.
Frequently asked questions
Does converting to PDF reduce my image quality?
Not when the image is not being resized. The original JPEG data is embedded directly into the document, so the pixels in the PDF are the pixels in your JPG. If you turn on resizing the image must be decoded and re-encoded, and that does cost a generation of quality.
Why is the PDF the same size as my JPG?
Because it contains your JPG. PDF supports JPEG as a native object type, so no re-compression happens — the file is your image plus a kilobyte or two of document structure. A converter that produces a much smaller PDF has silently re-compressed your photo.
Why is the page so large — over a metre wide?
PDF pages are measured in points at 72 to the inch, and the page is sized to match your image exactly so nothing is cropped or stretched. A 3000-pixel-wide image becomes a 3000-point page. Viewers scale it to your screen and printers scale it to your paper, so in practice you never see the nominal dimensions.
Can I put several photos into one PDF?
Yes, using the PDF builder rather than this page. Here each file becomes its own single-page PDF, which is what keeps the passthrough possible. The builder takes several images, lets you set the page order and page size, and produces one document.
Is the PDF searchable or selectable?
No. It contains a photograph, not text, so there is nothing to select or search — even if the photo is of a document full of words. Making it searchable needs OCR, which recognises the characters and adds an invisible text layer behind the image.