The two-step problem this removes
The usual advice for getting an iPhone photo into a document is to convert it to JPG and then convert that to PDF. It works, and it costs you a folder full of files you did not want, a second lossy pass over an already compressed photo, and twice the waiting.
Here the .heic goes straight in. The decoder that the HEIC conversion pages use runs the same way, hands over pixels, and those pixels are written as a page. One step, no intermediate files.
Why iPhone photos are awkward everywhere else
Turning an iphone photo to pdf is awkward everywhere else for one reason. Since iOS 11, an iPhone saves photos as .heic by default. Inside one is an HEVC intra frame, and HEVC carries patent licensing, so Chrome and Firefox never shipped a decoder for it. The result is a format that is completely ordinary on the phone and completely unreadable on the web, which is why so many converters tell you to change format first.
The decoder here is libheif compiled to WebAssembly, fetched once as a 1.4 MB download and then cached. It runs in a worker thread, so a folder of twenty photos is a progress list rather than a frozen tab. It also handles the tiled layout Apple uses for larger images, which simpler decoders get wrong.
Page size, margins and printing
Fit-to-image gives every page the shape of its photo, which keeps the file small and is right for anything read on a screen. A4 or US Letter centres each photo on a standard sheet and rotates to landscape where the photo is wider than tall, which is what you want when the document is going to a printer or to an office that expects paper sizes.
Add a margin in that case. Most printers cannot reach the edge of the sheet, and a photographed document with its edges clipped is worse than one with a white border. Everything runs in your browser, and no photo is ever sent to a server.