About PNG to PDF
PNG is what most screenshot shortcuts, scanning apps and diagram editors save by default, because it records every pixel exactly. That precision is also why a folder of PNGs gets heavy and awkward to send. This tool gathers them into a PDF: either one document that gives every image its own page, or a separate PDF for each file.
Your browser decodes each PNG, paints it onto a white canvas and writes the result into the PDF as a JPEG image. Every PDF reader can display that, but JPEG is lossy, and the hard edges of small letters are where lossy compression shows first. At the default quality of 92 you may spot faint speckles around text when you zoom in. For screenshots of documents, code or spreadsheets, and for line diagrams, drag the quality slider to 100 before converting. The file gets a bit larger and the edges stay clean.
Unless you choose otherwise, any image wider or taller than 2,560 pixels is scaled down to that long edge, which still prints sharply on a full page; smaller images keep their pixel dimensions. Captures from a high-resolution laptop or monitor can exceed the limit, so pick 4096 px in the size menu when you want to keep more of their detail.
How to use PNG to PDF
- Add the PNG filesDrop your PNGs onto the page, choose them with the file picker, or paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard. One run takes up to 500 images.
- Set quality, page size and orderMove quality to 100 for text-heavy captures. Then choose Letter, A4 or Fit to photo, and sort by date, by file name, or in the order you added the files.
- Convert and save the PDFKeep the default of one combined PDF or switch to one PDF per image, then convert. Separate PDFs can be downloaded together as a ZIP.
When people use it
A how-to built from screenshots
You captured each step of a settings change and want a coworker to follow along. Screenshots rarely carry a capture date, so date order falls back to each file’s saved time, which normally matches the moment you pressed the shortcut. Fit to photo then shows every capture without paper margins.
A paper form your scanner app saved as PNG
Some scanning apps store each page as a PNG. Choose Letter or A4 so the pages come out on standard paper with a half-inch border, and send the signed form as one attachment instead of a handful of image files.
Charts and flowcharts for a report
A chart exported from a spreadsheet or a flowchart saved from a whiteboard app often arrives as PNG. Convert it at quality 100 and you have a PDF page to attach on its own or slot into a longer document with Merge PDF.
Transparent backgrounds become white
PNG can store transparency and JPEG cannot, so every image is flattened onto white before it goes into the PDF. For most screenshots and logos you won’t notice. Watch out for artwork made for a dark background, such as white lettering or a pale logo with a see-through surround: on a white page it can all but disappear. Add a dark background layer in your image editor first if it needs to stay visible. The PNG specification covers how the alpha channel works if you want the technical detail.
Tips for crisp screenshot pages
- Quality 100 for text. It removes almost all of the JPEG artifacts that blur small type.
- Crop before you convert. The whole image goes on the page, so menu bars, docks and empty desktop come along unless you trim them.
- Skip 1280 px for documents. Shrinking a full-screen capture that far can make ordinary body text hard to read.
- Let orientation follow the image. On Letter and A4, a wide capture gets a landscape page and a tall one a portrait page, each inside 0.5-inch margins.
- Use Fit to photo for reading on screen. Each page takes the image’s own proportions, with no white border.
Size, metadata and limits
How big the PDF ends up depends on what the PNGs contain. Photographs and busy screenshots usually shrink, because JPEG handles them more efficiently than PNG does. Flat graphics with large areas of a single color can go the other way, since PNG compresses those extremely well. If a combined file turns out too large, run it through Compress PDF or convert again with a smaller size setting.
Text chunks and any EXIF data inside the PNGs are not copied. Apart from the pictures, the PDF records only a title, a creation time and a producer name. Keep in mind what the conversion does not do:
- Text in a screenshot stays part of the picture, so you can’t search, select or copy it, because this converter doesn’t run OCR. OCR PDF can make the finished file searchable.
- Pixel-exact storage isn’t offered. If the PNGs must be preserved exactly, keep the originals next to the PDF.
- Need separate images in another format rather than a document? Use the image converter.
Your PNGs are handled right here in the browser and never transmitted; you can check that in a few steps.