Every family has a box of old letters: a grandmother's letters from another country, a grandfather's postcards from the army, notes passed between siblings decades ago. The paper is getting fragile, the ink is fading, and the only copy is the one in the box. Photographing each letter with your iPhone is the fastest way to save them — but a folder full of HEIC photos is not an archive. A PDF is: one file, in order, readable on any device, easy to share with the whole family.
The first step is not technical at all. Sort the letters before you photograph anything. Put them in the order you want them read — by date if you can work it out, or by sender if the dates are lost. A pile of unsorted letters turns into a pile of unsorted photos, and nobody will sort them later. A quick numbering on a sticky note, one number per letter, saves hours of confusion.
Next, set up a simple photo station. A table near a window in daylight works better than a flash at night, which washes out old ink and throws a glare across the page. Lay each letter flat, weigh down curled corners with a book or a clean mug, and hold the phone straight above the page. Check the first photo at full size before you go on: if the handwriting is readable, the setup is right; if not, move closer to the light.
Photograph both sides of every letter, including the envelopes. Envelopes carry postmarks, addresses, and sometimes the only surviving date. Photograph the envelope first, then the pages inside, so the order in the camera roll already matches the order of the archive. That habit alone prevents most mix-ups.
Then turn the photos into a PDF. You can turn HEIC photos of old letters into a PDF archive right in your browser: open the tool, drop in the photos in order, and download a single PDF. The files never leave your device, which matters here — these letters may contain private family details that were never meant for a stranger's server. No account, no watermark, and the originals stay untouched on your phone.
Once you have the PDF, check it page by page before you share it. Flip through on a tablet and look for upside-down pages, a photo taken twice, or a page that came out blurry. Fix the problems now, while the letters are still on the table — going back to the box a month later to re-shoot one page is the kind of chore that never gets done.
A few details make the archive much better. First, keep the original HEIC photos in a folder named for the archive, separate from the PDF, so a future family member can re-export at higher quality if they ever need to. Second, add a one-page cover note at the front: who wrote these letters, roughly when, and who did the scanning. A date range and the name of the person who collected the letters are enough — future readers will thank you for those two lines. Third, make two copies of the finished PDF — one on your computer and one on a drive or cloud folder the family shares — because an archive with a single copy is barely an archive.
The letters in that box survived decades of moves, floods, and spring cleanings. Turning them into a PDF takes an afternoon and gives them a second life: one file the whole family can open, read, and pass on.
Disclosure: I'm the developer of FileOnTap.
