What changes when images become a PDF

2026-10-02

A PDF made by Image to PDF is a document with one page per image, in your order. Each page holds the picture you saw on its card. That is all it is meant to hold — and it helps to know what that leaves out before you share the file.

The picture itself

• Most JPG photos keep their image data. With Quality first, an ordinary JPG goes into the PDF without being re-encoded.
• PNG, screenshots and lossless WebP stay lossless, with no compression added.
• HEIC, lossy WebP and some unusual JPGs become JPG. They are decoded first and saved as high-quality JPG; their cards say so.
• Some images get fewer pixels: very large images that have to be decoded are scaled down to fit the device limit, and Smaller file reduces large images on purpose. Quality and file size explains both.

The direction your camera recorded and your own rotations are applied, so each page stands the way its card showed it.

Transparency

Transparent areas of a PNG or WebP stay transparent in the PDF. Most PDF viewers show them on the white of the page, so a logo with a transparent background usually looks as if it sits on white. HEIC photos are converted to JPG, which has no transparency.

Colour

A JPG that goes in directly keeps its embedded colour profile, when it has a valid one, so its colours are described the same way as in the original file. Images your browser has to decode are converted to standard sRGB colours, with 8 bits per channel. Very saturated colours from a wide-gamut photo can look slightly less vivid after that conversion, and a 16-bit PNG keeps fewer shades.

Hidden information in your photos

Photos often carry hidden details: where they were taken, the camera or phone model, the date and time, editing history. Image to PDF does not write these into the PDF:

• Location (GPS), camera details, dates and comments stored inside your images are removed.
• The PDF itself has no title, author or creation details filled in.
• Your file names are not written into the PDF. The file is named after the day it was made, such as images-2026-10-02.pdf.

This removes hidden data, not what is visible. A street sign, a face, an address on an envelope or a name in a screenshot are part of the picture, and they stay in the PDF. Look through the pages before you share them.

Text in screenshots and photos

Text in a screenshot or a photographed page becomes part of the image. You can read it, but you cannot select it, copy it or search for it, and a screen reader cannot read it aloud from the file. Image to PDF does not recognise text (it does not run OCR), and links in a screenshot do not work in the PDF.

A PDF is not a copy of your files

The PDF holds pages, not your original files. You cannot take your HEIC photos, PNGs or their file names back out of it, and the images that were converted, scaled down or stripped of their hidden details are not the originals. Keep your original images: they are the version with everything intact, and you can make a new PDF from them whenever you need one.

Your originals are not changed. They are read on your device, and nothing is uploaded.