Filestay

PDF tools

Merge documents, build PDFs from photos and pull pages back out as images. Your documents stay on your device.

Why local matters more for PDFs

Think about what you actually merge into a PDF. Bank statements for a mortgage application. Scanned passport pages for a visa. Medical records for a second opinion. Signed contracts. Payslips.

Every server-based PDF tool asks you to upload all of that and trust a privacy policy you did not read. Many of those services are entirely honest. You have no way to tell which ones, and no way to verify a deletion schedule.

Doing the work in the browser makes the question moot. There is no server to trust because there is no server. You can confirm it yourself: open developer tools, watch the Network tab, merge something, and observe that nothing carrying your document is sent.

The common workflows

Photographed documents into one PDF

Almost every official process wants PDF; almost every document people have is a phone photo. Take the photos, run them through JPG to PDF with A4 pages and a 10 mm margin, and you have a document that will pass a form validator. If the pages are large, compress the photos first — a 300 KB target per page keeps a twelve-page pack under 4 MB and still reads perfectly.

Assembling an application pack

Passport scan, photo, proof of address, bank statement, cover letter. Some will be PDFs already and some will be photos. Convert the photos with JPG to PDF, then combine everything with Merge PDF — the result screen hands the new file straight over, so there is no intermediate download.

Sending one page instead of a whole document

PDF to JPG renders each page as an image at the resolution you choose. 144 dpi is right for anything that will be viewed on a screen; 300 dpi is print quality and produces much larger files.

What we deliberately do not do

PDF to Word. Client-side conversion produces results poor enough to damage trust in everything else here — mangled tables, lost formatting, text in the wrong order. We would rather not offer it than offer it badly.

Removing passwords you do not have. Password removal only makes sense for files whose password you know, and even then it belongs in a tool that says so plainly.

OCR. Turning a photographed page into searchable text is a genuinely different problem, and the models that do it well are large. It is on the roadmap, not in this release — and until it is here, a PDF built from photos contains pictures of text, not text.

Questions people actually ask

Are my PDFs uploaded?
No. Merging and building PDFs is done by pdf-lib inside your browser tab; rendering pages to images is done by pdf.js, the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs. Neither transmits anything. This matters more than usual for PDFs, which tend to be contracts, statements and medical records.
What about password-protected files?
Encrypted PDFs cannot be read without their password, and these tools do not attempt to bypass encryption. Open the file in a reader with the password, save an unprotected copy, and use that.
Is there a page or file limit?
Not an imposed one. Fifty documents and several hundred pages merge comfortably on an ordinary laptop. The real ceiling is how much memory your browser tab is allowed.
Does merging reduce quality?
No. Pages are copied object by object into a new document — the same fonts, images and vector content. Nothing is re-rendered or re-compressed. The output is often smaller than the sum of its inputs, because repeated fonts get stored once.
Can I split a PDF or delete pages?
Not yet. Splitting, page deletion, rotation and reordering arrive with the PDF Organiser. Merging, image-to-PDF and PDF-to-image are available now.