August 28, 2026
Five Steps From Phone Photos to a Rental Application PDF
The landlord's portal wants one PDF under the size cap. Five steps take a folder of phone photos and two forms to a single file that uploads first try.
The listing had eleven viewings booked for Saturday, so you photographed everything the same night: passport, two pay slips, the reference letter from your last landlord, the bank statement page with your name on it. Nine photos, all from your phone, half of them shot sideways because that was the only way to fit the page in frame.
Then the portal asked for one PDF, maximum 10 MB, and rejected the first thing you tried to upload because .HEIC is not on its list. The application form and the tenancy checklist you had already downloaded are PDFs. The photos are not. Nothing you are holding is the shape of what the portal wants.
This is a five tool job, and the useful part is that you never download anything until the very end. Each result hands straight across to the next tool, so what you upload at the end is one file that has been through the whole sequence, not nine files you had to shepherd through your Downloads folder one at a time.
The chain at a glance
- Convert the HEIC photos to JPG and shrink them in the same pass
- Rotate the sideways ones so every page reads the right way up
- Turn the photos into A4 pages in the order the landlord asked for
- Merge with the application form and checklist you already had
- Compress the finished packet under the cap
Step 1: Get the photos into a format anything can open
HEIC is the reason the first upload failed, and it is also the reason the photos are so large. Converting to JPG fixes both at once.
Drop all nine photos in together. Set Quality to High rather than Max, then open Show advanced options and turn on Resize (longest side). Around 2000 px is the sweet spot for documents: comfortably readable when the reviewer zooms into a date or a signature, and roughly a fifth of the weight of the 4000 px original. Images already smaller than your limit are left at their original size, so you can set it once and forget about the older screenshots in the batch.
Don't download yet. The next tool is not in the shortlist under Send to another tool, so open Other compatible tools and pick Rotate Image. All nine files travel across at once.
Step 2: Straighten the sideways ones
Here is the small feature that saves the most time. Under Apply to, choose Landscapes, then hit Right 90° once. Only the photos you shot in landscape rotate. The portrait ones, which were already fine, are untouched.
That beats clicking through nine thumbnails, and it beats fixing orientation later in the PDF, where you would be rotating pages one at a time with no thumbnail grid to check your work against. If one photo ends up upside down, the per image buttons on its thumbnail fix just that one.
Leave Output format on Keep original. You already chose your quality in step 1 and there is no reason to re-encode a second time.
Again, no download. Open Other compatible tools and choose JPG to PDF.
Step 3: Turn nine photos into nine pages
The default here is Page size: Fit image, which makes each page exactly the shape of its photo. For a photo album that is right. For a document a stranger has to read, it is not: they get a PDF where every page is a different size and the zoom level jumps at every scroll.
Set Page size to A4, Orientation to Portrait, and Margins to Small. Now it reads like a scanned document rather than a camera roll.
Then drag the thumbnails into the order the landlord actually asked for. Passport first, pay slips, bank statement, reference letter last. Reordering costs you fifteen seconds now and saves the reviewer from hunting.
Leave One PDF per image switched off. You want one document, not a ZIP of nine.
This time the handoff is easier: Merge PDF appears directly in the suggestions under Send to another tool.
Step 4: Add the forms you already had
Your new nine page PDF arrives here on its own, and merging needs at least two files. Use Add more files to bring in the completed application form and the tenancy checklist from your Downloads folder.
Drag all three into the final order, usually the landlord's form first because that is what the reviewer opens looking for. Set Output filename to something a human can file: moreau-rental-application.pdf is a better thing to have sitting in someone's inbox than merged.pdf.
One thing to watch: individual uploads here cap at 50 MB. That is not usually a problem after step 1 did its resizing, but it is a real problem if you skipped it.
Compress PDF is in the suggestions on the result screen.
Step 5: Get under the cap
Pick Recommended. It is balanced for exactly this: email, sharing, and archiving. Screen squeezes harder but softens fine print, which is the one thing you cannot afford on a pay slip. Print barely reduces anything.
Check the number on the download screen before you upload. If a packet this size is still over 10 MB, the honest fix is going back to step 1 with a smaller longest side, not compressing twice.
Now download. This is the only file that ever touches your disk.
Why this order
Convert and resize in the same pass. Every conversion re-encodes a JPG and loses a little. Doing the size reduction inside step 1 rather than as a separate tool later means one re-encode instead of two, from the original camera file.
Rotate before the photos become pages, not after. Once they are PDF pages you are rotating a page box one page at a time. As images you get a thumbnail grid and the Landscapes filter, which fixes the whole batch in one click.
Compress last, on the merged file. The cap applies to the finished packet, so that is the only number worth measuring. Compressing the parts separately means the photo pages get squeezed twice, once alone and once in the merge, while the already small text forms get nothing out of it.
Set the page size before merging, not after. There is no repaginating a PDF later. If the photo pages go in as A4 portrait, they sit flush with the forms, which were already A4. Skip it and you get a document that changes shape every time the reviewer scrolls past page nine.
What you end up with
One properly named PDF, in the order the landlord asked for, every page the right way up and the same size, comfortably under the upload cap. Fifteen minutes of work the first time, and about five once you have done it, which matters when the next flat you like also wants the packet by Saturday.
Ready to start? Open Image to JPG →