How to Convert Images to PDF for Court Filing

If you're filing exhibits in federal court — photos, screenshots, scanned documents — you need them in PDF format. Most guides tell you to buy Adobe Acrobat. You don't need to. Here's how to do it for free, in under a minute, without uploading anything to a server.

Why Courts Require PDF

The federal judiciary's CM/ECF system only accepts PDF files. Every motion, exhibit, and attachment you file electronically must be in PDF format. This applies whether you're an attorney using a $600/year Acrobat license or a pro se litigant working from your kitchen table.

The issue for most pro se filers is that evidence often starts as images — photos from your phone, screenshots of text messages, scanned receipts, medical records you photographed. These need to be converted into PDFs that meet your district's formatting requirements before CM/ECF will accept them.

How to Convert Images to Court-Ready PDF

1. Go to ecfpdf.org in any browser — desktop, tablet, or phone. There's nothing to install, no account to create, and no ads to navigate around.
2. Drop your exhibit images into the upload zone. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, and TIFF. You can drag multiple files at once or click to browse your folders.
3. Reorder your pages. Drag the image thumbnails to arrange exhibits in the order you want them to appear in the PDF. Each image becomes one page.
4. Set your options. Choose Letter (8.5 × 11) for most federal districts. Leave orientation on Auto-Detect so landscape images get landscape pages. Give the file a descriptive name like exhibit-a-text-messages.
5. Click "Generate Court-Ready PDF" and the file downloads directly to your device. Done.

CM/ECF File Size Limits by District

Every federal district sets its own maximum file size for PDF uploads. If your exhibit PDF exceeds the limit, CM/ECF will reject it and you'll need to split it into smaller files. ECF PDF monitors your estimated file size and warns you before you hit the limit.

Here are the limits for some of the most common filing districts:

If your district isn't listed, you can look it up using the PACER Court CM/ECF Lookup tool. When in doubt, keeping individual PDFs under 30 MB is a safe bet for almost every district.

Tips for Keeping File Size Down

Scanned documents and high-resolution photos are the most common culprits for oversized PDFs. A few things that help: use 300 DPI resolution when scanning (higher isn't better for court purposes), scan in black and white unless color is essential to the exhibit, and crop images to remove unnecessary borders before converting.

If you're converting phone photos, they're often 3-5 MB each. A PDF with 10 full-resolution photos can easily hit 30-40 MB. For large exhibit sets, consider splitting them into multiple PDFs — for example, exhibit-a-photos-1-10.pdf and exhibit-a-photos-11-20.pdf.

What Makes a PDF "Court-Friendly"

Courts don't just need any PDF. They need PDFs that are formatted correctly. The key requirements across most federal districts are: Letter size (8.5 × 11 inches) paper, no embedded scripts or executable code, no password protection or security restrictions, and no form fields (the PDF must be "flattened"). ECF PDF generates clean, flat PDFs that meet all of these requirements by default.

Some districts also require PDFs to be text-searchable. Image-based PDFs (which is what you get when converting photos) are inherently not text-searchable. For exhibits like photographs, this is expected and accepted. For scanned text documents, you may want to run OCR (optical character recognition) separately if your district requires it.

Privacy and Security

ECF PDF processes everything locally in your browser. Your images are never uploaded to any server. The PDF is generated on your device using JavaScript, and the file downloads directly to your computer. We operate no backend, collect no data, and have no way to see your documents. This is particularly important when you're working with sensitive legal evidence.

Before filing, always review your PDF to make sure you haven't included sensitive information that should be redacted. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 requires that filings exclude full Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, names of minors, and complete financial account numbers.