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How to Convert Images to PDF (Without Installing Anything)

Last week I had to submit a receipt to my insurance company. They wanted a PDF. I had a photo on my phone. That’s it — that was the whole problem, and it took me way longer than it should have.

I tried printing to PDF from the Photos app, but the image came out tiny in the corner of a letter-sized page. I tried an online converter, waited for the upload, got hit with a “sign up to download” modal. I ended up emailing the photo to myself, opening it on my Mac, and using Preview to export as PDF. Four steps across two devices for something that should take ten seconds.

That experience is actually why we built PDF output into heic.site (it’s one of the features we launched with Pro).

Why anyone needs image-to-PDF conversion

It comes up more than you’d think:

  • Insurance claims — every company I’ve dealt with wants PDF attachments, not image files
  • Job applications — “please upload your documents as PDF” when all you have is a phone scan
  • School assignments — teachers who want one PDF instead of six separate photos of your handwritten work
  • Real estate — inspection photos, signed documents, disclosure forms
  • Government forms — visa applications, tax documents, ID copies

The pattern is always the same. You have an image. Someone needs a PDF. There shouldn’t be friction in between.

The usual options (and why they’re annoying)

Adobe Acrobat works perfectly but costs $20/month. For turning a photo into a PDF. No thanks.

Online converters upload your file to a server, process it, then let you download. Most of them are fine, but I’m not comfortable uploading insurance documents or ID photos to some random server in who-knows-where. And the ones that are free usually slam you with ads or limit you to 2 files before asking for money.

Print to PDF from your operating system technically works but gives you no control over page size. Your image ends up floating in a sea of white margins on a letter-sized page, which looks unprofessional.

Preview on Mac handles it well, honestly. But it’s Mac-only, and you have to know the export trick (File → Export as PDF). Most people don’t.

How we handle it

On heic.site, you pick PDF as your output format, drop your images, and get back a PDF where each image fills the page edge to edge. The page dimensions match the image — a landscape photo gives you a landscape page, a portrait shot gives you portrait. No weird margins, no letter-size waste.

The conversion happens entirely in your browser using a library called pdf-lib. Your photos never leave your device. No upload, no server processing, no waiting. I can convert a 15-megapixel photo to PDF in under a second on my phone.

If you drop multiple images, each one becomes its own PDF. You can download them individually or grab a ZIP of all of them.

What about multi-page PDFs?

Right now we generate one PDF per image. If you need to combine five photos into a single five-page PDF, that’s on the roadmap but not built yet. For now, you’d convert each image to PDF and then merge them with a tool like PDF Arranger or macOS Preview (drag thumbnails from one PDF window into another).

I know that’s not ideal. We’re working on it.

Which image formats work?

Everything we support as input: HEIC, AVIF, WebP, PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF. The most common workflow is probably iPhone photos (HEIC) to PDF, but it works with anything.

One thing to know: the PDF will contain a JPEG or PNG version of your image inside it, so the file size is comparable to a high-quality JPEG. We’re not doing any extra compression — what you see in the original photo is what you get in the PDF.

The privacy thing

I keep bringing this up because it matters. When you convert a receipt, an ID scan, or a medical document to PDF, you probably don’t want that file sitting on some company’s server. With heic.site, the conversion runs in your browser tab. We literally cannot see your files because they never leave your machine.

If you need to share the resulting PDF with someone, Pro users can generate a temporary download link that expires in 24 to 72 hours. But even that step is optional — you can just download the PDF and attach it to an email yourself.

Give it a spin

Head to heic.site, select PDF as your output format, and drop an image. PDF output is a Pro feature, but you can see the converter in action with the free formats (JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF) to get a feel for how it works. Once you’ve got your PDFs, you can share them with a temporary link if you’re on the Pro plan.