PDF Combiner
A claim form wants the receipt, the invoice and a photo of the damage as one PDF. Two of those are already PDFs; the third is a photo in your camera roll.
The awkward part isn’t the merge. It’s that a photo becoming a page involves decisions nobody asks you about — what size that page is, whether the image fills it, and how heavy the result gets.
Turn the photos into pages, then merge
In PDF Combiner this is two screens, and the first one is where the decisions live.
- 1
Open Images to PDF and add them
Take them from Photos or from Photos (Files), whichever holds the ones you need. Add several at once; Append + takes more later, and Edit reorders them.
- 2
Set the page, not just the picture
Format (A4, Letter and the rest), orientation, Margins and Position decide what the finished page looks like. A receipt on an A4 page with margins reads like a document; the same photo edge-to-edge on a page shaped like a phone camera reads like a snapshot someone pasted in.
- 3
Decide whether it's one document or many
Merge into one PDF file on gives you a single document from the whole set. Off gives you one PDF per image — which is what you want when each photo has to be uploaded separately.
- 4
Convert, then combine with your PDFs
Now the photos are a PDF like any other. Merge PDF takes it together with the invoice and the receipt, and you drag the list into the right order before exporting — the same flow as merging PDF files.
If the paper part of the stack doesn’t exist as a file yet, Scanner sits inside the Merge PDF picker, so a signed sheet goes in without a detour through the camera and Photos.
All of it runs on the device — which is the whole point when the stack is an insurance claim, an ID scan or a medical result.
The part that catches people out: size
A PDF built from photographs is a stack of full-resolution images, and it is heavy in a way text documents never are.
A concrete measurement: four camera photos — 1.9, 2.6, 2.5 and 2.8 MB — came out as a 10.6 MB PDF. Four pages, nothing added. A dozen photos and you’re past 30 MB, which most mail servers refuse somewhere around 20–25 MB.
The cheapest fix is upstream. Compress & Resize Photos works on the images themselves: a photo shrunk to a sensible size before it becomes a page costs nothing in readability, because a page of A4 at print resolution doesn’t need 12 megapixels. If the document is already built, that’s a compression problem instead.
Screenshots are the pleasant exception: mostly flat colour, so they compress well and a twenty-page PDF of screenshots stays small.
What the built-in tools do
Photos only, quick and dirty. In Files, select the images, touch and hold the selection, then Quick Actions → Create PDF. iOS builds one PDF from the whole selection and drops it in the same folder, named after the first image. That was the 10.6 MB result above, and it’s the fastest route there is. What it doesn’t give you is any control at all: no page format, no margins, no reordering once it’s done, and no way to mix in a PDF you already have.
One picture into an existing document. On iPhone and iPad, open the PDF in Preview, tap the page count to show the thumbnails — pinch two fingers on the page if the count isn’t showing — then touch and hold the thumbnail the picture should follow and tap Insert from File. On a Mac, select the page it should follow and choose Edit → Insert → Page from File; the new page lands after the selected one.
Both are genuinely good for one image. They’re one-at-a-time by design, so a set of photos means repeating the whole sequence per file, and the page you get is whatever shape the photo was.
HEIC and the format question
Nothing here needs converting first. HEIC, the iPhone’s normal photo format, is read directly by every route above, and the images are re-encoded as JPEG on the way into the PDF regardless of what they started as — we checked inside the finished file, and all four pages of the Files-built PDF were JPEG streams.
Which also means the format isn’t what makes these documents heavy. The pixels are.
When the photos are the document
Everything above treats a photo as a page in a document that’s mostly about something else. When the images are the point — a portfolio, product shots, a photo report — Photo Templates lays them out with a design instead of filling the page edge to edge. Different job, different tool.
More walkthroughs like this one are in the PDF Combiner guides — including merging PDFs and, going the other way, splitting one back into separate files.