Order is the hard part, not the joining
Putting several pictures into one file is arithmetic. Getting them into the right sequence is the part that goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a predictable way: a phone hands files over in whatever order it feels like, a chat app renames everything, and a document that reads pages 1, 10, 11, 2 is rejected before anybody looks at page three.
So the photo tray is the document here, not a preview of it. There is no second list to keep in step with the thumbnails, and no separate confirmation screen where the order could differ. Position four in the photo tray is page four in the file, and the sheet shown beside it is the sheet that will be written.
Three ways to get the sequence right
- Drag. Fine for moving a page a few places. Pick the thumbnail up and drop it where it belongs.
- Sort. By file name, with numbers read as numbers, or by the time stamped into each photograph when it was taken. A morning of scanning sorted by capture time lands in the order you did the work, which is usually the order the document wants.
- The bracket keys. Focus the photo tray, arrow to a page, and hold
[or]. This is the only method that is comfortable when page eighty needs to be page two.
Once the sequence is settled, the rest is the sheet and the margin, and — if something at the far end has given you a figure to beat — the size the file has to come under.
Questions about long sets
How many photographs can go into one document?
Two hundred. The photo tray holds thumbnails rather than whole photographs, so the count is limited by what a browser tab can keep track of, not by what it can decode. Past two hundred the sensible move is a second document anyway — a three-hundred-page PDF is rarely what the person at the other end wanted.
My files are named IMG_2, IMG_10, IMG_11. Will they sort properly?
Yes. Sorting by file name reads the digits as numbers, so IMG_2 comes before IMG_10. Plain alphabetical sorting — which is what a file manager often gives you — would put IMG_10 first and quietly reverse a morning's work.
Can I move page nine to the front without dragging it that far?
Click the photo tray so it has focus, use the arrow keys to land on the page you want, then hold the left square bracket. Each press moves it one place earlier. The right bracket moves it later. R turns it, Delete takes it out, and none of it needs a pointer.
One photograph appears twice in my set. Is that a problem?
No, and you can do it deliberately: the duplicate button puts a second copy of a page directly after it, which is how a cover sheet or a repeated declaration gets into a document without opening the same file twice.