What does "add image to PDF" mean?
To add an image to a PDF is to put a picture onto a page of a document that already exists — a company logo on a letterhead, a scanned stamp on page three, a screenshot dropped into a report, a photo into a form somebody emailed you at 4pm. It sounds like one of the simplest things you could ask a computer to do, and the result is either invisible or obviously wrong: the logo sits where it belongs, or it sits in a white box, or it sits off the edge of the page entirely.
It is a different job from turning pictures into a document. If you have five photos and want them to become a PDF, that is Image to PDF, and it builds a new file. Here the file is the one you already have, with its text, its links and its page count intact — you are inserting one image into one page of it.
Add Image to PDF does this in the browser tab you are already in. Drop the PDF and page one renders. Drop the picture and it lands centred at 33% of the page width, ready to move. Drag it where it belongs, pull the corner handle to resize, hit Download. Both files stay on your machine, there is no account, and nothing is stamped on the output. It costs nothing to use.
How to add an image to a PDF
Add Image to PDF is five steps, and four of them are drag-and-drop.
- Drop the PDF onto the page, or click the drop zone and pick one. Page one renders straight away. Only the page you are looking at is ever drawn, so a 400-page contract opens as quickly as a one-page invoice.
- Drop the image you want on it. PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP and HEIC all work. It appears in the middle of the page at a third of the page width, outlined in green, already grabbable.
- Drag it where it belongs. Pull the small square handle at the bottom-right corner to resize — the height follows the width, so the picture never stretches out of shape. There is a Width box beside the preview if you would rather type
20than drag to it. - Pick the page. On a multi-page PDF, a numbered strip sits under the preview. Turn on Put it on every page if it is a logo that belongs on all of them.
- Hit Download. You get the same PDF back with the picture in it, named after the original.
A real run, with the numbers the tool actually reports. Take Letterhead.pdf — four A4 pages, 595.28 × 841.89 points. Drop in a 900 × 300 px logo, type 20 into the Width box, and drag it into the top-left corner. The line under the preview reads:
20% of page width · 119 × 40 pt · Page 1 of 4
That is the placed logo: 119 points wide by 40 tall, which is about 42 × 14 mm on the printed page. Download gives you Letterhead-with-image.pdf. Every other page, and every word of text on page one, is untouched.
The preview is the result. The rectangle you drag and the rectangle written into the file come out of one calculation, not two that ought to agree. If it looks right on screen, it is right in the file — including on rotated pages, which is where this normally falls apart.
Where the image actually lands: the two bits of arithmetic
Two things quietly decide whether this works, and both are coordinate math nobody should have to think about.
The page counts from the bottom; your screen counts from the top
A PDF measures a page from the bottom-left corner upward. A browser canvas measures from the top-left corner downward. Copy one straight into the other and the picture flips to the wrong half of the page — and a centred image still looks fine, so the bug only shows up the moment somebody drags.
Worked through: a US Letter page is 612 × 792 points, rendered onto a 918 × 1188 pixel canvas. Drag a 400 × 150 logo down to the bottom-right at 25% width and the tool writes it into the file at x = 400, y = 68, sized 153 × 57 points. The y of 68 is measured up from the bottom of the page — a hand-rolled version would have written 667 and put the logo near the top.
Scanned pages carry a rotation flag
Almost every phone scanning app stores a sideways page by writing a rotation entry into the file rather than turning the content. Readers honour it and show the page upright; the page's own coordinate system does not. So a tool that writes your drop position straight into the file lands the stamp on a different edge, or off the page.
| Page rotation | What you see | What the file's coordinates say | Handled? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0° | 612 × 792 pt upright | 612 × 792, origin bottom-left | Yes — the vertical flip only |
| 90° | 792 × 612 landscape | Still 612 × 792, turned a quarter | Yes — position mapped, picture rotated to stay upright |
| 180° | 612 × 792 upright | 612 × 792, both axes reversed | Yes |
| 270° | 792 × 612 landscape | Still 612 × 792, turned the other quarter | Yes |
Same US Letter page, this time with a 90° rotation flag on it. The page presents itself as 792 × 612. Drop the image at the same spot and the tool writes x = 474, y = 600 with a 90° turn on the picture itself, so it comes out upright and where you put it. You will never see those numbers. You will see the stamp land where you dropped it, which is the entire point.
Transparency, and why logos come back in a white box
This is the failure that sends people looking for a different tool. You have a logo saved as a PNG with no background. You put it on a cream letterhead. It comes back sitting inside a white rectangle, and nothing you do to the PNG fixes it, because the PNG was never the problem.
The cause is a conversion step you cannot see. Plenty of pipelines re-encode every incoming picture as a JPEG before embedding it, because JPEG is small and predictable. JPEG has no alpha channel — no way to store "this pixel is empty" — so the encoder paints something into the transparent pixels, and that something is white. In Add Image to PDF, each format takes the route that keeps whatever it has:
| Format | How it goes in | Transparency |
|---|---|---|
| PNG | Embedded as-is, bytes untouched | Kept |
| JPG / JPEG | Embedded as-is | None to keep — JPEG has no alpha |
| WebP | Redrawn to PNG, on a canvas that starts empty | Kept |
| GIF | Redrawn to PNG (first frame of an animation) | Kept |
| BMP | Redrawn to PNG | Kept where the file has it |
| HEIC / HEIF | Decoded to JPEG first — no browser shows HEIC natively | None to keep |
The word doing the work is empty. The conversion canvas is never painted with a background colour before the picture is drawn onto it, so transparent pixels stay transparent and whatever is under them on the page shows through. A signature PNG over a printed line looks like a signature over a line, not like a sticker.
Putting one logo on every page
Place the picture once, turn on Put it on every page, and every page gets it. The toggle only appears when the PDF has more than one page, because on a single-page document it could only mean one thing.
What matters is that the placement is stored as a relative position rather than a set of coordinates. Take a three-page contract, A4, with a 512 × 512 px seal dropped in at the default width. The tool records it as 33.5% across and 38.3% down, then works out fresh coordinates for each page from that page's own size and rotation — 196 × 196 points per page, all three, same visual spot. The line under the preview reads 33% of page width · 196 × 196 pt · All 3 pages and the download is contract-with-image.pdf.
That indirection earns its keep on assembled documents, which routinely mix A4 with US Letter and often include a rotated scan. Copying one pair of coordinates across would leave the logo creeping toward the edge on the odd page out.
What can go wrong, and what to try first
Most of these have a one-line answer.
- The PDF won't open. Usually it is password-protected. You will get a plain message saying so rather than a stack trace. Open it in your PDF reader, save a copy without the password, and drop that one in.
- "Couldn't read that image." The browser could not decode the file — often a renamed extension, or a format outside the six supported. Re-save it as a PNG or a JPG and it will go in. Your PDF stays loaded while you sort it out; you do not start over.
- The HEIC pauses for a second. That is the decode, and it is the only noticeable wait in the tool. If you are placing a lot of iPhone photos, running them through HEIC to JPG first turns that pause into a one-time job.
- The picture won't go fully off the page. Deliberate bleed off an edge is allowed, but the tool keeps at least a tenth of the image on the page so you can still grab it. A design that runs off three sides is fine; one that vanishes is not.
- You typed a width over 100. It clamps to 100% of the page width and tells you. On a US Letter page that is the full 612 points across.
- You need two pictures. Download the result, drop it straight back in, place the second one. About ten seconds, and it keeps this a tool you understand at a glance rather than a small photo editor.
- You want a mark on every page, not a placed picture. That is PDF Watermark. And if what you actually need is a signature, Sign PDF lets you draw one instead of making you find a PNG of it first.
Going the other way? Extract Images from PDF pulls every embedded picture out of a document as separate PNGs — useful when you need the logo that is already in a file rather than a new one.
Why this one doesn't ask for an account
Dragging a logo onto a page is a thirty-second task. The usual way to do it online is not shaped like a thirty-second task. It is shaped like a funnel: upload your document to somebody's server, wait, then meet a daily cap, a file-size ceiling, or a sign-in prompt standing between you and the download. Or it is one feature buried inside a document suite you rent monthly, most of which you will never open. The limits are not about the picture — they exist because the work is happening on rented hardware and somebody has to meter it.
Nothing in Add Image to PDF runs on a server, so there is nothing to meter. The PDF is read off your disk, the page is drawn on your machine, the image is embedded in the tab, and the download is assembled locally. You can watch it: open your browser's network panel, place a picture, download, and see that nothing goes out. That matters more here than in most places, because the documents people put stamps and logos on are contracts, invoices and signed forms. Close the tab and both files are gone.
So: no account, no daily limit, no file-size cap, no watermark on what you download. This is the whole tool, not a taster of a bigger one. Microapp gives 10% of every dollar it earns to charity, off the top, audited quarterly — the tools are the business, not the bait.
Frequently asked questions
Does the image quality drop when I add it to the PDF?
No. A PNG or a JPG goes into the document exactly as it left your disk — same bytes, no re-compression pass. WebP, GIF and BMP are redrawn once as PNG, which is lossless. The only format that changes is HEIC, decoded to JPEG because no browser reads HEIC directly. What does change is the displayed size: a 4000 px wide photo placed at a fifth of a page is shown small, with all its detail still in the file.
Can I set the position by typing exact numbers?
You can type the width as a percentage of the page — the box beside the preview takes 1 to 100. The position itself is drag-only, on purpose: for one image on one page, dragging beats doing arithmetic in points, and the preview shows you the answer as you go.
Will the downloaded file still have selectable text?
Yes. The document is opened, one image object is added to the page you chose, and it is saved again. Nothing is rasterised. That is worth knowing because the alternative approach — turning every page into a picture, stamping the logo on, and turning it back into a PDF — is common, and it quietly destroys the text layer, breaks search, and can triple the file size. If a tool ever hands you back a PDF whose text you can no longer select, that is what happened.
Does it work on a phone or a tablet?
Yes. Dragging and the corner resize handle both respond to touch, and the preview scales to the screen. The one thing to know on mobile is memory: a very large PDF with a very large image can run out of room on a phone where a laptop copes, because the whole job happens in the device's own memory.
What image formats can I put on a PDF?
PNG, JPG/JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP and HEIC/HEIF. Anything with a transparent background keeps it, apart from HEIC and JPEG, which have no transparency to keep. Animated GIFs are placed as their first frame — no error, just the one frame. Anything else gets a plain message asking you to re-save it as a PNG or JPG, with your PDF still loaded.
Can I remove the image after I download?
Not from the downloaded file — once it is saved, the picture is part of that page. Keep your original, which the tool never modifies: it reads the file you dropped and writes a separate new one called <name>-with-image.pdf. If you need to take something out of a PDF rather than put something in, Redact PDF removes content properly, and Split PDF lets you drop whole pages.
Is there a limit on how many times I can use it?
No. No daily task cap, no page limit, no file-size ceiling, no account. The practical ceiling is how much your own browser can hold in memory, which for putting a logo on a contract is far beyond anything you are likely to be working with.