Photos to PDF

A photograph of a document is still a document

Whether it is accepted depends less on the camera than on three dull details: light, angle and whether the whole sheet is in frame.

Build one fileFrom the photos you already took

Each image becomes a page in the order you give it. Nothing is cropped and nothing is re-encoded beyond what the page frame requires — a photograph of a receipt stays the photograph you took.

What gets a submission returned

A corner outside the frame

A stamp or a signature half out of shot is the most common reason. Photograph the whole sheet with a margin around it, even if that means a smaller image.

Shadow across the text

Your own hand or phone casting a shadow over half the page. Daylight from the side and the sheet flat on a table solves it.

An angle

A photograph taken from above at an angle makes straight lines curve. For a document that will be checked, shoot square to the page.

Resolution beats megapixels

A sheet filling the frame at eight megapixels reads better than the same sheet photographed from a metre away at forty-eight. What matters is how much of the sensor the document occupies, not the number on the camera app.

The photographs stay on the device: this tool needs no server, and with receipts and identity papers that is the part worth knowing.