HEIC to PDF: turn iPhone photos into PDFs for free

Some forms don't want your photos. They want a PDF. Job applications, insurance claims, government portals, rental applications: upload your documents, and the accepted format is PDF, not a stack of HEIC files your iPhone spit out.

About 30,000 searches a month in the US are people trying to solve exactly this. Here's the simple version.

The problem with HEIC uploads

HEIC is invisible to half the internet. The upload form says "PDF only" and your iPhone photos are HEIC. You're stuck in the middle with a phone full of photos and a form that won't take them.

Screenshots of the photos don't help. Screenshots are low resolution and look unprofessional on anything official. You want the real photo inside a real PDF.

The free way

Open Jiggle X Wiggle's free image to PDF converter, drop in your HEIC photos, and download the PDF. Multiple photos go into one PDF, in the order you add them, which is exactly what those upload forms expect.

No account needed. No watermark stamped across your documents, which matters when the PDF is going to a landlord or a government office.

Getting the order right

If the PDF needs pages in a specific order (front of ID, then back of ID, for example), add the photos in that order. Renaming the files 01, 02, 03 before you upload makes this foolproof, because upload dialogs sort alphabetically.

Check the PDF before you submit it. Open the downloaded file and flip through every page. I've seen people submit PDFs with a sideways photo they never noticed because they didn't preview.

If your iPhone is set to Most Compatible mode under Settings, then Camera, then Formats, your photos are already JPG and you can skip the HEIC step entirely.

Practical tip: if the form has a file size limit (many cap at 5 or 10 MB), convert your HEIC to JPG first at 80% quality, then make the PDF from the JPGs. Photos at document resolution don't need to be huge, and this keeps you under the limit.