How to Turn HEIC Photos Into a PDF

Scanned forms, receipts and ID photos taken on an iPhone arrive as HEIC, and almost everything that asks for a PDF will not accept one. Two tools on this site do it between them, and neither uploads your photos.

The two steps

• Convert. Drop the photos on the HEIC converter, choose JPG, and save them — up to thirty at once.
• Assemble. Drop the JPGs on the image to PDF tool, put them in the order you want, pick a page size, and download the PDF.

Why it is two steps and not one

Because being honest about it is worth more than looking slick. The PDF tool works on pictures the browser can decode, and no browser decodes HEIC without help. Folding the decoder into that page would mean every visitor downloading it, including the great majority who arrive with ordinary JPGs. Keeping them separate means each page only asks for what it needs.

A few things worth knowing

• Orientation is handled. Both tools read the EXIF rotation tag and bake it into the pixels, so a photo taken sideways does not land sideways in the PDF.
• Location data is removed. Re-encoding strips EXIF, so the GPS coordinates in the original never reach the PDF.
• Quality is yours to set. A lower JPG quality in step one makes a noticeably smaller PDF, which matters when a form caps the upload size.