Make PDF from Photos: Albums, Portfolios and Sharing

To make a PDF from photos that people enjoy opening, pick fewer photos than you have, put them in a deliberate order, give each one a page of the same size, and keep the file small enough to send. The technical part takes a minute; the choices before it decide whether the result is an album or a pile.

Plan the PDF from photos

Decide who will open it and on what. A family album read on phones can use one photo per page in portrait or landscape. A portfolio sent to a client wants a consistent page size, so every page looks deliberate. A set for printing needs enough pixels for the paper, and create PDF from images shows the numbers. Sort the photos first, then rename them with leading zeros, such as 01-beach.jpg and 02-dinner.jpg, so any tool keeps your order.

Make a PDF from photos with a fixed page

This script puts each photo on an A4 page, rotated to the right way up, in file-name order. It ran on 2026-10-24 with img2pdf 0.6.3: with auto_orient=True, a landscape photo got a landscape page of 11.69 by 8.27 inches and portrait photos got portrait A4 pages.

import glob
import img2pdf

a4 = (img2pdf.mm_to_pt(210), img2pdf.mm_to_pt(297))
layout = img2pdf.get_layout_fun(a4, auto_orient=True)
files = sorted(glob.glob("photos/*.jpg"))
with open("album.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img2pdf.convert(files, layout_fun=layout))

In the same test, img2pdf applied the rotation tag of a phone photo by setting the page rotation, while Pillow ignored it, which photo to PDF explains. Without Python, a built-in route such as Finder’s Create PDF on a Mac builds a PDF from files in the order you select them, per Apple. For the merging rules of each tool, see combine images into PDF.

Keep the PDF easy to share

A PDF made from photos is about as large as the photos. If you send it by email, Gmail’s help gives 25 MB for all attachments in a message on personal accounts, and above that Gmail adds a Google Drive link. Fifty photos of a few megabytes each will exceed that. Resize the photos before you build the PDF, or split the album into parts. For bulk work with one file per photo, read convert photos to PDF.

FAQ

How many photos can I put in a PDF?

The PDF format does not limit it in practice; the limits come from your tool, your memory and where you send the file.

Can I choose which photo is on which page?

Yes. Page order follows the order of the file list, or an arrange step in the tool.

How do I make the PDF smaller?

Resize the photos before you build it, because the PDF is about the size of the photos inside it.