Why photos print badly straight from the gallery
A phone photo has a 4:3 shape; A4 paper is roughly 1:1.41. Print one directly and the printer driver guesses: it may crop the edges off, shrink it into a corner, or stretch it. Placing the photo on a properly sized page first removes the guesswork. What you see in the preview is exactly what comes out of the printer.
Choosing how the image fills the page
- Fit (default): the whole image is shown, as large as the margins allow, with blank space top and bottom or at the sides. Nothing is cut off.
- Center crop: fills the printable area completely and trims whatever overflows. Good for posters and photos where the edges don’t matter.
- Stretch: forces the image to the page shape. It distorts faces and text, so use it only for patterns or textures.
Tick Landscape for wide photos; a landscape image on a portrait page wastes half the sheet. Margins of 5, 10 or 15 mm keep the image clear of the unprintable border most home printers have.
Print quality
Pages are built at 150 DPI, which gives an A4 page of 1240 × 1754 pixels. That is sharp for documents and good for photos viewed at arm’s length. A typical phone photo has more than enough pixels; a small image saved from a website will look soft when stretched to a full page, and nothing at the printing stage can fix that.
The PDF is sized to the real paper, so choosing Actual size or 100 percent when printing gives exactly the margins you picked.
Questions
Can I put several photos on one page?
This tool places one image per page. For two sides of an ID card on one sheet, use ID card to PDF; for passport-size copies, use the passport photo maker.
How is this different from JPG to PDF?
JPG to PDF is quicker for turning a set of photos into a document. This page gives more control over the printed layout: fit mode, margin, orientation, background colour and perspective correction.