How to turn screenshots into a PDF

Three built-in routes, and one question worth asking first: do you need screenshots at all, or do you need the document?

Updated 12 September 2026

Ask this first#

If you're screenshotting a document to turn it into a PDF, skip the middle step. Press Ctrl+P or Cmd+P in the application and choose the PDF output.

You get selectable text, working links, a far smaller file, and no capture step at all. It works in browsers, Word, Excel, Pages, Mail and nearly everything else.

Screenshots-into-PDF is the right answer only when you need to show what the screen looked like — a bug report, a record of an interface, evidence of a transaction — rather than the content itself.

Windows#

Several images into one PDF:

1. Open File Explorer and select your screenshots in the order you want them. Windows uses selection order, so click them one at a time with Ctrl held rather than dragging a box.
2. Right-click and choose Print.
3. Set the printer to Microsoft Print to PDF.
4. Choose Full page photo for one image per page, or a contact-sheet layout for several.
5. Untick Fit picture to frame unless you want cropping.
6. Click Print and choose where to save.

One capture straight to PDF: in the Snipping Tool, Ctrl+P, then Microsoft Print to PDF.

Mac#

Several images into one PDF:

1. Select the screenshots in Finder.
2. Right-click, choose Quick Actions › Create PDF.
3. A PDF appears in the same folder immediately.

The order follows the current Finder sort order, so sort by name or date first.

For control over order and page size, use Preview instead: open all the images, show the sidebar with Cmd+Option+2, drag thumbnails into the order you want, then File › Print › Save as PDF.

Combining into an existing PDF: open it in Preview, show thumbnails, and drag image files into the sidebar at the position you want.

Chromebook#

No built-in image-to-PDF combiner, so use Google Docs:

1. Upload your screenshots to Drive.
2. Create a new Doc and insert the images in order.
3. File › Download › PDF Document.

You get control over order, captions and page breaks, which the other systems' quick methods don't offer.

For a single capture, open it in Gallery and press Ctrl+P, then Save as PDF.

Keeping the file size reasonable#

Screenshot PDFs get large fast, especially from Retina Macs where each capture may be several megabytes.

• Save captures as JPG before combining, if fidelity doesn't matter. How on a Mac
• Use Preview's Quartz filter on Mac: File › Export, then choose Reduce File Size. Check the result — it can be aggressive with text.
• On Windows, resize the images to the width they'll actually be viewed at before combining. A 3000-pixel-wide capture in an A4 PDF is wasted data.

Making it searchable#

A PDF made from screenshots contains pictures of text, not text. Nothing in it is searchable or selectable.

To fix that, run OCR over it — Acrobat does it, and several free tools do too. Or capture the text separately and paste it in. Extracting text from a screenshot

Better still, print from the original application, where the text stays text from the start.