Pictures Do Say a Thousand Words — How to Add Images to PDFs.
Combine the impact of imagery with the power of the portable document format (PDF). Add images to your PDF files. Whether for business, educational, or personal purposes, the inclusion of images in PDFs elevates the overall quality and presentation of your content and can transform static documents into more dynamic and engaging resources. Read on to learn how.
What you’ll learn
- Why images in PDFs are impactful
- Ways to add images to PDFs.
- Options to edit images in PDFs
- Convert image files to PDF
- Image formats compatible with PDFs
Images have an impact.
No matter what the nature of your content is, adding and inserting images to a PDF can serve several purposes. Used strategically, images in documents enhance the overall quality, engagement, and effectiveness of your content, and cater to different learning styles and communication preferences.
Some of the reasons to add images to documents include to —
- Add visual appeal.
Images can make your documents more engaging. They attract the reader's attention and make content more visually appealing and interesting overall.
- Break up text.
In lengthy documents, images can break up large blocks of text, making the content more digestible and less overwhelming.
- Make it memorable.
Visual content tends to be more memorable than text. Including images can help your readers retain information more effectively and remember the message and contents contained in your documents.
- Evoke emotions.
Images can evoke emotions. This can be particularly useful in marketing materials or persuasive documents where you want to elicit specific reactions from your audience.
- Improve accessibility.
For individuals who may have difficulty reading or understanding text, images can serve as an alternative means of communication, enhancing accessibility.
- Illustrate a specific point or concept.
Images can help to illustrate a point more effectively than words alone, especially in technical or instructional documents. They help to convey complex information and assist with understanding concepts that might be difficult to describe in text alone. In how-to guides or educational materials, images can demonstrate steps or provide examples to demonstrate the written instructions given in a document.
- Represent and reinforce your brand.
Images in documentation can be used to help to reinforce your brand identity across all communication. Logos, colour themes, and other branding elements should be consistent across all your documentation.
Ways to add an image to a PDF.
There are a few ways to add images to PDF documents. Inserting and adding images to existing PDF pages can be done online or in a downloaded Adobe Acrobat application. You can also combine and insert images as separate pages in PDFs using tools in Adobe Acrobat.
Here’s how to do each —
Add an image to a PDF online.
Don’t want to download an application? The ability to add images to PDFs is available to you in the various web-based tools and features in Adobe Acrobat’s online services.
- Sign into Adobe Acrobat online.
- Choose the PDF file you want to add an image to. You can drag and drop a file, upload it from your device, or select a file from your documents folder in the Adobe Acrobat cloud.
- Click on the Edit menu and select “Add Image.”
- Select the image you want to insert from your documents folder, or your computer, or access other file storage locations such as OneDrive and Google Drive™.
- Position, resize, and rotate the image to suit.
Add an image to a PDF with an Adobe Acrobat application.
Have an Adobe Acrobat application installed or want to test what you can do with the Adobe Acrobat free trial?
- Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat.
- From the Tools menu, select “Edit a PDF”
- From the “Add Content” section, select “Add an Image”
- Select the image you want to insert from your computer.
- Position, resize, and rotate the image to suit.
Add a full-page image to a PDF
Want to insert an image into a PDF as a separate page? There are a couple of options for doing this Adobe Acrobat. You can use the “Combine file” or the “Organize pages” tools. Here’s how —
Combine an image file as a page in a PDF.
- Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat.
- From the Tools menu, select “Combine files.”
- Choose from “Add Open Files” or “Add Files”
- Select the image file to insert as a page into a PDF
- Then “Combine.”
Insert an image file as a PDF page.
- Open your PDF file in Adobe.
- From the Tools menu, select “Organize pages.”
- Select “Insert,” and choose from inserting an image from a file, a clipboard, or a scanner
- Choose the location of the page in your PDF
Options to edit an image in a PDF.
Once you’ve added an image (or two or three or more) into a PDF you’ve got a few tools at your fingertips to edit images in PDFs. You can, for example —
- Flip your image vertically or horizontally
- Rotate your image clockwise or counterclockwise
- Crop your image
- Resize a PDF image
- Arrange the image so it sits in front or behind text or other elements in your PDF
- Align objects so they are placed in the same position horizontally and/or vertically
- Make further edits to your image in Adobe Acrobat or with another application
- Use OCR technology to convert PDF images to text
- Add alt text to be read aloud by screen readers.
Convert image files to PDFs.
It’s simple and easy to convert images to PDFs, and vice versa. Using web-based Acrobat tools and features you can —
In an Adobe Acrobat application, simply —
- Click on “Create” in the top menu
- Select from the single and multiple file options
- Add your image(s), and the Adobe Acrobat conversion process will kick in.
To convert a PDF page to an image file in Adobe Acrobat Standard or Adobe Acrobat Pro -
- Select “Export a PDF” from the Tools menu and then choose your image format.
Images formats compatible with PDFs.
You’ve got the flexibility to insert just about any type of image format into a PDF file. PDF-compatible image formats include BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, and PCX. Once you’ve -inserted an image into a PDF, you can edit it further to get it just how you want.
Easily save and share a single slide from a presentation in PDF format or convert a full PowerPoint presentation to PDF. You can —
- convert from PowerPoint to PDF online
- convert from PDF to PowerPoint online
- choose a downloaded Adobe Acrobat application to convert from PowerPoint to PDF or insert and combine your presentation files.
Related content
Other articles to help with presenting PDFs include —
- Make Your Presentations Pop: Create Effective PDFs for Presentations
- Create Engaging Digital Marketing Documents with Interactive PDFs
- PDFs and eBooks — Create Stunning Digital Publications
