How to combine HEIC photos into one PDF

2026-10-09

HEIC to PDF collects any number of HEIC photos into a single PDF: a set of receipts, the pages of a handwritten form, the photos from one trip. Each photo gets its own page, in the order you see on screen. The photos are read on your device and are not uploaded.

Add the photos

Tap Add HEIC photos and select as many photos as you need. You can come back for more; each new batch goes to the end of the list. Every photo opens on its own card. On a desktop computer, five 12-megapixel photos took about 2.3 seconds to open in Chrome and 0.6 seconds in Safari’s engine; on a phone it takes longer.

Put them in order

The number on each card is its page number in the PDF.

• Drag a card to its new place. On a touch screen, press and hold the card first, so a quick swipe still scrolls the list.
• A card’s More menu (⋯) has Move earlier, Move later and Move to…. The last one asks for a page number, which is quicker than dragging in a long list.
• The toolbar’s More menu has Sort by name. If your file names already follow the order you want, this lines the photos up in one step. Look over the result before you save.

Turn, remove, undo

If a photo still lies on its side after its own rotation has been applied, tap Rotate 90° clockwise on its card, once for each quarter turn. Remove takes a photo out of the list; the file on your device stays where it is.

Undo steps back through your changes and Redo brings them back, so a wrong drag or an accidental Remove is easy to put right.

Photos that can’t go in

One bad file doesn’t stop the others. Each card says what went wrong:

• Not a HEIC: a JPG, PNG or WebP image — even one renamed to .heic — is turned away with a link to JPG to PDF, PNG to PDF or Image to PDF. An AVIF photo gets AVIF isn’t supported. Add HEIC or HEIF photos. Reading the same file again would give the same answer, so these cards have no Try again, only Remove. On iPhone and iPad a JPG is the exception: the photo library can hand over a HEIC as a JPG, so its card lets you continue with it or use the original HEIC from Files, as iPhone photos to PDF explains.
• Damaged or cut off: the card says the photo couldn’t be opened and offers Try again and Remove. A broken HEIC used to come out as a plain white picture in Safari’s engine without any error; the app now checks the file and asks a second decoder before it accepts a picture of a single colour.

When you save, cards that couldn’t be opened can be cleared with Remove them or skipped with Continue with N pages. They never become blank pages.

One photo per page

Every photo becomes one page. Page setup applies one rule to the whole PDF: A4 or Letter with the photo scaled to fit and centred, or Fit to image, where each page takes its own photo’s shape.

Large batches and file size

A PDF can’t hold HEVC, so each photo is stored as a JPG, and JPG needs more bytes than HEVC for the same picture. A PDF of HEIC photos is therefore usually larger than the HEIC files. Five 12-megapixel iPhone-style photos made a PDF of 9.5 MB in Chrome and 13.0 MB in Safari’s engine with Quality first.

If the PDF has to fit an email attachment limit, open Page setup and choose Smaller file. The same five photos then made 1.5 MB in Chrome and 3.0 MB in Safari’s engine: large photos are reduced to 2000 px on their long side and stored with a lower JPG quality, but only where that really makes the file smaller. How much your own PDF shrinks depends on your photos; there is no fixed percentage. Orientation, colour and quality compares the two options.

We have not measured how many HEIC photos a real iPhone can handle in one go. If your phone’s browser struggles with a long list, make two or three smaller PDFs.

Save

Tap Save PDF (on iPhone and iPad, Prepare PDF, then Save or share). Cancel stops the work, including a photo that is still opening. When the PDF is ready, the strip at the bottom shows the number of pages and the real file size. The basic steps are also in how to convert HEIC to PDF.