Convert JPG and PNG images to a single PDF

Five concrete differences: (1) Pricing — Adobe Acrobat Pro is $19.99/mo with mandatory Adobe ID sign-in even on the free online JPG-to-PDF tool, plus the free tier limits you to 2 conversions before forcing the 7-day trial; Smallpdf gates the free tier at 2 tasks per day across all 21 tools, then $9/mo Pro for batch; iLovePDF caps free at 20 images per batch then $9/mo Premium; Canva Pro is $14.99/mo to remove watermarks; pdfFiller is $20/mo Premium after a 30-day trial; CamScanner forces account creation and stamps an ad watermark on free; jpg2pdf.com is genuinely free but caps at 20 files and 5 MB per file with 60-min server retention. iFillPDF is fully free with no card and no signup, no batch cap, no file-size cap. (2) Formats — this is where we are behind, not ahead: iFillPDF takes JPEG, PNG and WebP only, so iPhone HEIC needs a JPEG export first; Adobe accepts JPEG/PNG/BMP/GIF/TIFF (also no HEIC); jpg2pdf.com adds SVG; iLovePDF is the one that handles HEIC directly, at $9/mo Premium. (3) Privacy — Adobe processes on AWS us-east-1 under Cloud Act 50 USC §3024 + FISA 702; Smallpdf hosts in Switzerland outside EEA (no automatic GDPR adequacy); iLovePDF on Spanish servers; pdfFiller and CamScanner on US AWS; jpg2pdf.com retains uploads for 60 minutes. iFillPDF runs PDF-lib + WebAssembly entirely in your browser — your photos never leave the device under GDPR Art. 4(2). (4) Metadata — nobody in this list strips EXIF, us included: JPEGs are embedded as-is, so GPS coordinates and camera serials ride into the PDF. Strip them from the images first if that matters. (5) Output — iFillPDF writes a plain standards-conformant PDF with your images embedded losslessly; there is no PDF/A archival mode and no OCR, so if IRS 26 USC §6001 retention rules push you toward a searchable archival file, add a dedicated step after conversion.

No — and there is no point pretending otherwise. The drop zone accepts JPEG, PNG and WebP; a .heic file straight from the Photos app will be rejected. The conversion takes about ten seconds: on iPhone, open the photos, tap Share, and AirDrop or save them — iOS converts to JPEG automatically when the destination does not support HEIC; on a Mac, select the images in Preview, then File > Export and choose JPEG, which handles a whole batch at once. Be aware the JPEG re-encode takes 10-bit HEIC down to 8-bit, so a little dynamic range is lost — unavoidable with any tool that does not read HEIC natively. Adobe Acrobat online has the same limitation (JPEG/PNG/BMP/GIF/TIFF, no HEIC), as does jpg2pdf.com; iLovePDF handles HEIC at $9/mo Premium, and HiPDF free caps at 5 MB per file and uploads to a server.

No upload — that part is unambiguous. Conversion runs entirely in your browser via pdf-lib (MIT-licensed, 4M+ npm downloads a week), so your photos never leave the device under GDPR Article 4(2), and you can verify it yourself: open the Chrome DevTools Network tab during a conversion and you will see zero requests to ifillpdf.com. Metadata is the part where we will not flatter ourselves: JPEGs are embedded byte-for-byte, so EXIF GPS coordinates, camera serials, lens model, IPTC copyright tags and capture timestamps travel into the PDF intact. That is good for fidelity and bad for privacy, and it is the same behaviour as Adobe Acrobat online. If you are protecting a source, sharing listing photos or producing under FRCP Rule 34, strip the images first with Preview, the iOS share sheet or exiftool. For context on the alternatives: Smallpdf and iLovePDF retain uploads for up to 2 hours on their EU/CH servers, jpg2pdf.com for 60 minutes, and CamScanner was flagged by Kaspersky for embedding the Necro trojan in 2019 Android builds. If you take the $8.99 one-time Lifetime offer for cloud-saved PDFs and shared workspaces, hosting moves to Hetzner Falkenstein eu-central-1 under TADPF Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework with AES-256-GCM at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022 — zero Cloud Act 50 USC §3024 / FISA 702 / Executive Order 14086 exposure.

No cap on the number of images; each file must be 50 MB or smaller, and beyond that your device RAM is the real limit since the work happens in your tab. A typical M1 MacBook Air handles a hundred 48MP JPEGs comfortably. By contrast: jpg2pdf.com caps at 20 files plus 5 MB per file; iLovePDF free caps at 20 images per batch (then Premium $9/mo for unlimited); Smallpdf caps at 2 free tasks per day across all 21 tools; Adobe Acrobat online does not publish a documented per-batch cap but enforces a 100 MB total upload limit. For very large batches we recommend splitting into two passes and using our PDF Merge tool afterward — both run client-side and chain in under a minute.

You can turn them into a tidy PDF, but not a searchable one — worth separating those two things. Snap photos of a paper IRS Form W-9, receipts for a Schedule C deduction, a signed NDA or 1099-NEC backup, export them as JPEG, drop them in, and you get one PDF in a few seconds with each photo centred on an A4 or Letter page. What you will not get is OCR: there is no text layer, so the result is not searchable, not selectable and not an archival PDF/A file. If a retention rule points you at a searchable archive — IRS 26 USC §6001, 17 CFR §232.302 SEC EDGAR, HIPAA 45 CFR §164.316(b)(2) — run the PDF through a dedicated OCR tool afterwards. Two things worth doing before you drop: rotate any sideways photo, since there is no EXIF auto-rotate here, and run the pages through Microsoft Lens or the Apple Notes document scanner if you want perspective correction and deskew.