August 1, 2026
Sixty-Three Archive Photos in the Wrong Order
Ines photographed 63 pages of an 1890s ledger at a municipal archive. Here is how she used a free browser tool to convert JPG to PDF and fix the order.
Sunday afternoon. Sixty-three photos on the laptop, and page 10 sitting between page 1 and page 2.
Ines is three years into a doctorate on rural credit. The previous Thursday she spent six hours in a municipal archive photographing an 1890s lending ledger, page by page, with her phone. No scanners allowed in the reading room, no flash, no tripod. Her supervisor wanted the whole ledger as one readable file by Monday, which meant she needed to convert JPG to PDF and get the pages back in sequence. She had done neither before.
Page 10 Came Before Page 2
The photos themselves were fine. The order was not.
She had shot them front to back, and her phone named them IMG_1 through IMG_63. Somewhere between the phone and the laptop, something sorted them as text rather than numbers, so IMG_10 landed right after IMG_1, and IMG_20 right after IMG_2. A ledger read out of order is not a ledger. It is 63 loose photographs of handwriting.
Her first attempt was the print dialog. Select all, print to PDF. That gave her one image per page inside a white border thick enough to shrink the handwriting past the point of reading, and it preserved the broken order faithfully. Fixing that would have meant renaming 63 files by hand, on a Sunday, on a nine-year-old laptop she did not want to install anything on.
One Result Without a Sign-Up Wall
She searched for a way to convert JPG to PDF online, free, and skimmed past the first few results. Two wanted an account before they would show her anything. One had a five-file limit unless she upgraded. The fourth was MyTools, and it opened straight onto a drop zone.
Reorder First, Convert Second
She dragged all 63 files in at once. They came up as a thumbnail grid, each one numbered in the corner, and the numbers made the problem visible in a way the file list never had. She dragged page 10 back where it belonged, then 11 through 19, then the twenties. About four minutes of tidying.
Two shots were sideways, taken with the phone turned for the wider double pages. She fixed those in the image rotator and dropped them back in.
The settings gave her more thought than the reordering did. A4 portrait letterboxed the wide ledger pages into a thin strip with white above and below, so she switched the page size to fit-to-image and set margins to none. The preview stopped wasting space. She left the "one PDF per image" box unchecked, because the entire point was to end up with one file.
One of the photos had the corner of her notebook in the frame. She left it.
Nine Megabytes, Sent Sunday Evening
The PDF came out at 88 MB, which the university mail server refused on sight. She ran it through the PDF compressor and got it down to about 9 MB. The 1890s handwriting was still legible at full zoom, which was the only test that mattered.
Sent at 6:40 PM. Her supervisor opened it Monday and asked about an entry on page 41, which meant the pagination had survived.
Why She Went Back Two Weeks Later
Nothing installed, no account, no cost, and the whole thing ran in the browser tab. That last part turned out to matter more than she expected. Archives put reproduction conditions on their material, and she is not supposed to hand unpublished images to a third party. Since the conversion happened locally and the files never left her machine, there was nothing to explain to anyone.
Two weeks later she was back at the same reading room with a second ledger, and this time she took the photos knowing exactly what she would do with them.
Sixty-three phone photos, one ledger, one PDF, and no software installed. Try the JPG to PDF converter for free →