Photos of documents, scanned pages saved as images, screenshots, diagrams — sooner or later they all need to end up inside a PDF, in the right order and mixed with existing pages. PDF Arranger imports images as PDF pages, so a JPG scan and a regular PDF page become neighbours in one document you can then reorder, rotate, and export.
One dependency matters here: image import is powered by img2pdf, an optional companion tool. The transparent-image support in particular comes from img2pdf 0.4.2 or later, so if you work with PNGs that have transparency, an up-to-date img2pdf is what you want.
Before you start
You need PDF Arranger 1.14.0 (or a recent version) installed. If it is not on your computer yet, download PDF Arranger first — it is free, open source (GPL-3.0), and works entirely offline, so your files never leave your computer. On most packaged installs the import works out of the box; if image files are refused, installing or updating img2pdf is the fix.
Nothing you do in PDF Arranger changes the original file on disk. Every edit only takes effect when you export the result to a new PDF, which makes experimenting safe: if the output is not what you wanted, adjust the arrangement and export again.
Step by step: import images as pages
- Open PDF Arranger, with or without an existing PDF loaded — images can start a new document or join an existing one.
- Import the image files. Each image becomes a page in the arrangement, in the order imported.
- Arrange the new pages. Drag them among the existing PDF pages, rotate any that came in sideways, and delete duplicates or failed shots.
- Resize or crop if needed. Photo pages often have different dimensions from document pages; the Page Size dialog’s Fit to paper option makes them uniform before printing.
- Export the combined document as a PDF.
Transparency and formats
With a current img2pdf, images with transparency are supported, so a PNG logo sheet or a transparent diagram keeps its transparent background as a page rather than being flattened onto white by an older conversion path. Everyday formats such as JPEG and PNG are the typical inputs; if a specialist format fails to import, converting it to PNG first with an image editor is the reliable workaround.
The reverse: explode a page into images
PDF Arranger also runs this in reverse with Explode into images: a page that contains images is split so each image becomes its own page. That is the quick way to pull the individual scans or photos back out of a combined page so you can reorder, delete, or export them separately.
Tips
- Imported image pages are pictures, not searchable text — PDF Arranger has no OCR. If you need searchable scans, run OCR with a dedicated tool before or after assembling the PDF.
- Keep the original image files if quality matters; exporting pages back out later will not exceed the quality you imported.
A worked example: phone photos to a clean PDF
A typical job: twelve photos of a paper form, taken on a phone, that must be submitted as one PDF. Import all twelve images; they arrive as twelve pages in shooting order. Two are sideways — rotate them. One is a duplicate of a page retaken for legibility — delete the blurrier copy. The photos are all slightly different sizes, so fit the pages to a single paper size for a tidy result. Export, and you have a submission-ready document. Note what did not happen: the text in the photos is still just pictures, so if the receiving system needs searchable text, OCR has to happen in a dedicated tool as a separate step.
Related guides
Keep going with these step-by-step guides from the same series: