How to Censor a Photo and Save It as a PDF

The requests come bundled: “redact the account number and send it as a PDF.” Insurance claims, expense reports, visa applications, HR paperwork — the redaction and the format conversion are one errand, so the tool should treat them as one flow.

Why PDF for Redacted Material

Three reasons offices ask for it: PDFs archive predictably (no photo-app recompression mangling the evidence), they read as documents rather than snapshots, and they slot into the systems on the receiving end. For you there's a fourth: exporting a redacted image into a fresh PDF guarantees the mask is part of the page itself — not an annotation someone's PDF editor can lift off.

Redact → PDF in One Flow (Step by Step)

1. Redact the photo firstOpen the image in Redact Photo, auto-detect faces or text, and apply your masks — black box for the sensitive fields, blur where softer is fine.
2. Scrub the metadataIn the EXIF panel, strip GPS, camera info, and timestamps — a document photo's metadata can say where and when it was taken.
3. Choose “Save as PDF”From the export menu, pick Save as PDF. The redacted image becomes a clean PDF page, masks flattened in.
4. Send it where it's goingShare straight into email or the upload portal — or save to Files for the records folder.

Size and Fit

Uploads have limits; the export flow includes resizing by dimension or file size (with a live preview), so a 1.8 MB photo can leave as a 0.2 MB attachment that still reads perfectly. The document-side details — what to mask on IDs, why black box — live in redacting documents on iPhone.