Combine photos and scanned documents into a single PDF directly in your browser, without your files ever leaving your device.
You need to merge several scanned documents into a single PDF to send by email. Or combine photos of receipts for an expense report. Or group images of your ID, pay stubs, and a contract to upload to a government portal that only accepts a single PDF file. It is an everyday need, and most online tools that handle it have a serious problem that goes unnoticed: they upload your documents to their servers.
Think about what you typically convert to PDF. It is rarely vacation photos. It is usually documents with personal information: IDs, passports, invoices, bank statements, pay stubs, medical prescriptions, contracts. Information you would not want ending up in the hands of a third party.
And yet, the vast majority of online converters work exactly that way: you upload your images to their server, the server generates the PDF, and sends it back. Your documents pass through infrastructure you do not control, managed by a company whose data policies you probably never read. Some store files for hours. Others claim to delete them immediately, but you have no way to verify that.
The irony is that generating a PDF from images is an operation your own browser can perform without sending anything anywhere. There is no technical reason for your documents to travel to a server.
With the image to PDF tool from SocialShrink, the process is straightforward and everything happens in your browser:
At no point is anything uploaded to any server. Your images are processed in the browser's memory, the PDF is built locally, and it is downloaded. When you close the tab, no trace remains.
The quality of the PDF depends directly on the quality of the images you put into it. A few practical tips:
When you convert images to PDF, the result is exactly that: a PDF containing images. The pages look like the original document, but the text that appears in them is not selectable or searchable. It is a photo inside a PDF.
A PDF with OCR (optical character recognition) is different: software analyzes the image, detects the letters, and creates an invisible text layer on top. This allows you to copy text, search for words within the document, and lets screen readers read it aloud.
For most everyday uses (sending documentation, archiving receipts, submitting expense reports), an image-based PDF is perfectly valid. OCR is only necessary if you need to search for text within the document or extract data programmatically. It is worth knowing that OCR requires complex processing and, in most online tools, involves uploading your document to a server, which multiplies the privacy risk.
If your original images are high resolution (12-megapixel phone photos, for example), the resulting PDF can be quite heavy. To reduce it, compress the images before putting them into the PDF with the image compression tool. For scanned documents, a quality of 80-85% is usually more than enough: the text remains perfectly readable and the file size drops significantly.
Sometimes you need the opposite: extracting pages from a PDF as individual images, for example to include a page from a contract in a presentation. For that, there is the PDF to image tool, which also runs entirely in your browser.
No. All processing happens in your browser. The images are read into local memory, the PDF is built using JavaScript on your own device, and you download the resulting file. No data leaves your computer or phone at any point. This is especially relevant when you are working with sensitive documents like IDs, pay stubs, or medical records.
There is no fixed limit, but the more high-resolution images you include, the more memory your browser consumes. For typical documents (5-20 pages) you will have no issues. If you need to combine many images, compressing them beforehand helps prevent the browser from running out of memory.
The PDF contains images, not editable text. You can view the images, print them, and share the file, but you cannot select or modify the text that appears in the photos. For that you would need OCR software to convert the image into recognizable text, which is a separate process.
For most international use, A4 is the standard option (210 x 297 mm). It is the size expected by most government portals, institutions, and companies worldwide. If you need to send documents within the United States or Canada, Letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) is the norm there. If you are unsure, A4 is always a safe bet for international correspondence.