Why your phone photos turn sideways in a PDF

Your phone almost never rotates the picture it takes. It saves the image exactly as the camera sensor saw it and attaches a small note — the orientation tag — recording which way up the phone was being held.

Photo apps read that note and turn the picture for you, which is why the photo looks right everywhere you normally see it. PDF has no equivalent note. A converter that copies the image straight into a document copies the sensor’s version and discards the instruction, and you get a page lying on its side.

• The photo looks correct in your gallery, on your phone, and in a preview — but wrong in the PDF.
• It is rotated by exactly 90 or 180 degrees, never by a random angle.
• Portrait photos are affected and landscape ones often are not, or the other way round, depending on how you held the phone.
• Screenshots and images downloaded from the web are usually fine, because they were saved upright with no note attached.

If the rotation is inconsistent across a batch — some pages right, some wrong — that is a strong confirmation. The ones that are wrong are the ones you took holding the phone differently.

1. 1

   Use a converter that reads the tag

   The image to PDF tool here checks each photo’s orientation and applies it before the image goes into the document. Photos that need no rotation are embedded untouched, so nothing is re-compressed unnecessarily.

2. 2

   Or rotate and re-save first

   Open the photo in any editor, rotate it, and save. Editors write out the corrected pixels with the note cleared, so anything downstream sees an upright image.

3. 3

   Or rotate the finished PDF

   Workable for one or two pages, tedious beyond that, and it does not help if different photos are rotated different ways.

The obvious fix — redraw every image so the rotation is baked in — works, and costs something on every photo that never needed it. Redrawing means decoding and re-encoding, which loses a little quality and usually makes the file bigger.

Most images have no rotation to apply. Reading the tag first and only redrawing the ones that are genuinely rotated keeps the rest byte-for-byte as they were shot. It is a small distinction that shows up as a noticeably smaller PDF when you convert a folder of screenshots or scans.

If your iPhone photos will not load into a browser-based tool at all, they are probably HEIC rather than JPG. It is a newer format that saves space, and most browsers other than Safari cannot read it.

To change it: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, which saves new photos as JPG. For photos you already have, sharing or exporting them usually converts to JPG on the way out.