Accounting asks you to send over the contract, and what you have is eight phone photos of the pages shot on the kitchen table. The shots are crooked, one has a glare from the lamp, another shows part of your keyboard, and together they weigh almost 40 megabytes. Sending that is embarrassing. The person on the other end has to swipe through images and guess which side is the front and which is the back. What you need is one clean PDF where the pages run in order and open like a real document.
The trouble is almost always that a phone shoots a photo of a document, not the document itself: with perspective, shadows, and several megabytes per frame. The files sit jumbled in your gallery, names like IMG_2043 say nothing about order, and the recipient does not treat a JPG as an official copy. The good news is that you need neither a scanner nor Photoshop to assemble a tidy PDF out of this. Shoot the pages properly and merge them in the right order.
How to combine scans into a PDF, step by step
1. Open Scan to PDF and upload all your page photos or scans in one batch. 2. Check the page order and arrange it by dragging. This is the main thing. The phone sorts files by capture time, not by document logic, so the back of a page often lands before the front. 3. Drop the extra frames: duplicates, blurry shots, the accidental photo of your desk. A stray page in a contract reads as a mistake. 4. If a page is sideways or upside down, rotate it. The recipient should not have to tilt their head to read clause 4.2. 5. Merge the result into a single PDF and download the file. You end up with one document instead of a scatter of pictures. 6. Open the finished PDF and page through to the end: everything is in place, nothing is flipped, and no sheet went missing.
What can go wrong
- **Glare and shadows.** The lamp above the table burns a bright patch right onto the text, and your own shadow covers the bottom line. Shoot near a window in daylight, and keep the phone to the side of the light source rather than between the lamp and the sheet.
- **Skewed perspective.** Shoot at an angle and a rectangular sheet turns into a trapezoid, with the text drifting off at the far edge. Hold the camera straight above the page, parallel to the table, and frame it so the sheet fills most of the screen.
- **Scrambled order.** IMG_2044 and IMG_2045 do not guarantee that the front comes before the back. Always flip through the preview and set the pages by hand instead of trusting auto-sort.
- **Huge file size.** Eight photos at 4 to 5 MB each make a PDF near 40 MB, which will not fit in an email attachment. That resolution is overkill for text, so run the file through PDF to JPG and back, or compress it, to land at a reasonable 2 to 4 MB.
- **A picture instead of text.** A photo of a page is an image: you cannot select a paragraph, find a word, or copy the account details. If the recipient needs live text, run the PDF through recognition (OCR) separately.
- **Cropped edges.** Frame too tightly and the margins get eaten, so a stamp or a signature in the corner disappears. Leave 1 to 2 cm of slack around the sheet.
What to check before you send
- Every page of the document is there: front, back, and attachments.
- The page order matches the logic of the document, not the order you shot it in.
- No page is flipped or lying sideways.
- The text reads in full: no glare, no clipped lines, no shadows over the letters.
- The file size is sensible, a few megabytes rather than a few dozen.
What this pairs with
Once the PDF is assembled, it often needs finishing. If you need to pull text out of the contract for editing, PDF to Word helps. A finished Word document goes back into PDF through Word to PDF. And if instead you are building a PDF from separate shots from scratch, look at JPG to PDF, the same idea of merging pictures into one file.