How do I turn screenshots into one PDF?

Screenshots pile up quickly. A booking confirmation over three screens. A chat you need to keep. The steps of a setup you want to send to a colleague. A week of payment receipts for an expense claim.

Sent as ten separate images, they are hard to read in order and easy to lose. As one PDF they are a single, tidy document that opens the same way on every device.

Why screenshots are different from photos

A screenshot is not a photograph of the screen. It is an exact copy of the pixels, usually saved as a PNG. Text in it has hard, clean edges, and PNG keeps those edges perfectly.

That matters when you turn them into a PDF. PNG to PDF places each PNG in the PDF exactly as it is, pixel for pixel, so small print and thin lines look just as they did on the screen. Nothing is recompressed.

Step by step

1. Collect the screenshots. Take them from your camera roll or screenshots folder rather than from a chat app, where they may have been shrunk.
2. Add them all at once. Up to 30 go into one PDF, and JPG or WebP images can be mixed in.
3. Check the order. Put them in the order a reader should see them.
4. Choose the page size. For screenshots, Match the image is usually best: each page takes the shape of its screenshot, with no margin or a narrow one, instead of a tall phone screenshot being shrunk onto an A4 page.
5. Create the PDF and download it.

Getting the order right

Phones name screenshots with the date and time, such as Screenshot_20260114-093312.png. Sorted by name, they are in the order you took them, which is usually what you want.

The trouble starts with renamed files. step1, step2 … step10 sorts as step1, step10, step2, because computers sort text character by character. Either number them step01, step02, or set the order by hand before converting.

Long chats and long web pages

A scrolling screenshot of a long chat can be very tall. On an A4 page it would shrink until the text is unreadable. With Match the image the page takes the screenshot's shape, so the text stays at its real size and the reader scrolls, just as on the phone.

If you plan to print the PDF, several normal screenshots print better than one very long one.

Making the words searchable

A screenshot is a picture of words, so the PDF cannot yet be searched and the text cannot be copied. That is often fine for reading. When you need to find a booking number or copy an address, run the finished PDF through OCR PDF, which recognises the text and makes it selectable and searchable.

If you only need the text from one screenshot and not a PDF at all, Image to Text gives it to you directly.

Keeping the file small

PNG keeps every detail, so a PDF of many large screenshots can be several megabytes. Screenshots of mostly text are usually modest. If it is too big to send, Compress PDF reduces it.

Before you share it

Screenshots often show more than you meant to share: notifications, other chats, a phone number at the top of the screen. Crop them in your gallery before converting, or cover the details afterwards with Redact PDF, which removes the content under the box rather than just hiding it.