Preparing iPhone photos for a PDF
HEIC to PDF runs in your browser, and the photos are read on your device rather than uploaded. Most of what is special about iPhone photos happens before they reach the app: which format the camera saves, and what iOS hands to a web page. This guide covers those steps.
Does your iPhone save HEIC?
The camera setting decides. In Settings › Camera › Formats, High Efficiency saves photos as HEIC and Most Compatible saves them as JPG. HEIC to PDF is for the first kind; if your camera is set to Most Compatible, your photos are JPGs and JPG to PDF is made for them.
Picking photos on iPhone and iPad
Tap Add HEIC photos, and your iPhone shows its own choices, usually the photo library and the Files app. They don’t always hand the website the same file. On a real iPhone 14 Pro, a HEIC photo picked from the photo library reached the page as a JPG, in Safari and in Chrome; the same photo saved to Files and picked from there arrived as a HEIC. A website can’t tell whether a JPG started out as a HEIC, so the app only says what it received.
On iPhone and iPad, such a JPG opens on a card that says This image arrived from your iPhone as a JPEG. (on an iPad, from your iPad). You choose:
- Continue to PDF puts that JPG into the PDF as it is. Its card then says Added as JPEG, so you can see it didn’t go through the HEIC decoder.
- Use the original HEIC shows the steps: open the photo in Photos, share it and save it to Files, come back and add it again, this time from Files.
If you start the PDF while such a card is still waiting, the app asks whether to add it as a JPG or leave it out. PNG, WebP and other formats are turned away on iPhone too. On a computer or an Android phone, a JPG is turned away with a link to JPG to PDF, or Image to PDF if your photos are a mix of formats.
If a card says a photo couldn’t be opened, tap Try again. If it fails again, the file may be damaged; remove it, or make the PDF without it.
Getting HEIC photos onto a Mac
If you make the PDF on a computer, the HEIC files have to get there first. In the Photos app on a Mac, File › Export › Export Unmodified Original keeps the photo as HEIC. However you move photos — AirDrop, a cable, a cloud folder — the cards tell you whether each file arrived as a HEIC.
Live Photos
A Live Photo is a HEIC still photo plus a separate .MOV video. Only the still photo goes into the PDF; the video never does. A .MOV added by mistake is turned away with This isn’t an image this app can read. More on this in HEIC vs HEIF.
A page in the photo’s shape
On A4 or Letter, a phone photo sits in the middle of the page with white space around it. Fit to image in Page setup gives each photo a page of its own shape, with no margin, which suits a set of photos meant for the screen. Each photo’s own rotation is applied, so pages follow the way the photo was taken; orientation, colour and quality explains the details, including what happens to iPhone wide colour.
Text in a photographed document stays part of the picture: the app doesn’t recognise text.
Saving and sharing
On iPhone and iPad the main button says Prepare PDF. It builds the PDF and keeps you in the app instead of opening the PDF in Safari’s viewer. The strip at the bottom then shows the number of pages, the real file size and the file name, with two buttons:
- Save or share opens your phone’s share sheet with the PDF file. You pick where it goes, for example Files; the website can’t pick that for you. When the sheet finishes, the strip says Done and that the PDF was sent to the destination you chose, and the button becomes Save or share again. Closing the sheet without picking anything changes nothing.
- Open PDF opens the PDF in a new tab, only when you tap it.
On a computer or an Android phone the button says Save PDF and your browser takes over the download. Download again gives you the same file once more without rebuilding it, and Share appears only in browsers that can share files from a web page.
What we have and haven’t tested on a real iPhone
On a real iPhone 14 Pro in Safari we checked the steps above: a photo-library pick arriving as a JPG, the same photo from Files arriving as a HEIC, Prepare PDF, and saving the PDF to Files through Save or share. We have not measured how much memory a long list of HEIC photos needs, or how wide-colour photos look on the phone; the rest was measured on a desktop computer, in Chrome’s and Safari’s engines. If your phone struggles with many photos, make the PDF in two or three parts. The basic steps are in how to convert HEIC to PDF.
Make your PDF in the browser → HEIC to PDF