Why did the top and bottom of my product photo get cut off in the PDF?
Because the fit mode was fill and crop, or original size with an image bigger than the page. Both really clip whatever falls outside the margins. Switch to fit inside, or choose page fits the image, and the whole photo comes back.
What actually happened
A phone product shot is usually very tall, such as 1080 × 1920 pixels, which is a taller shape than an A4 page. Fill and crop scales the image until it covers the whole area inside the margins with no gaps, so if the image is taller than that area, part of it sticks out. That part is genuinely clipped, not painted over the margin.
In numbers from the tool's own layout function: on A4 portrait with 10 mm margins the available area is 538.59 × 785.2 pt. The 1080 × 1920 image in cover mode is drawn 538.59 wide and 957.49 pt tall, about 172 pt taller than the area. That is roughly 61 mm, half lost at the top and half at the bottom, which is why the top of your product or its base vanished.
Original size crops too
In original size the image is drawn at its real size for the DPI you enter, regardless of the page. The same image at 96 DPI is 810 × 1440 pt, larger than the whole A4 page, so you only see its middle. That mode is for printing at an exact physical size, not for fitting a picture onto a page.
How to know before you send the file
After building, Images to PDF shows a warning that part of the image was cropped on a given number of pages because it is larger than the space available. If you see that warning and did not intend any cropping, do not download yet. Check the preview too; it renders real pages from the finished file.
Three fixes, depending on what you want
- You want the whole photo on A4: choose fit inside. The same image is drawn 441.67 × 785.2 pt, complete, with space at the sides.
- You want the whole photo with no white space at all: choose page fits the image with a 0 margin, so the page takes the photo's own shape.
- You want a full A4 page but to decide yourself what goes: crop the photo first with the Image cropper to a shape close to the page, then use fill and crop. The remaining trim is small and comes from areas you chose.
When cropping is fine
On a cover page or a mood shot that should fill the page, losing a few millimetres of sky or floor does no harm and can look cleaner. For a product that must show in full, or a document with text near the edge, cropping is a mistake. Simple rule: if anything near the edges matters to the customer, stay away from the crop modes.
Common questions
Is the cropped part still hidden inside the file?
The original image is embedded whole, and a clipping path stops anything outside the area from being drawn, so it does not appear on screen or in print. Anyone who extracts the images from the file still gets the full picture, though, so crop the image itself first if the hidden part is something you should not share.
Why was only one photo out of ten cropped?
Cropping depends on each image's shape. Photos close to the page's proportions lose almost nothing; very tall ones lose more.
Does a bigger margin help?
A margin shrinks the available area but does not stop fill and crop from clipping. The fix is changing the fit mode.