The commonest disappointment in printed photo gifts is not the design or the paper. It is a photograph that looked fine on a phone and printed soft, discovered on page nine of a finished object.
It is also the easiest thing to check in advance, which is why this page exists.
The short answer
A photograph needs roughly 300 pixels for every inch it will be printed at. Anything beyond that is spare; meaningfully below it starts to look soft.
| Placement | Printed at about | Pixels you want |
|---|---|---|
| Small, several to a page | 2 inches wide | 600 px wide |
| A third of a page | 3 inches | 900 px |
| Half a page | 4 inches | 1,200 px |
| Full page | 8 inches | 2,400 px |
| Full spread across two pages | 16 inches | 4,800 px |
Any phone from the last decade shoots at 3,000 pixels wide or more, so a photograph taken on a phone and sent properly will print at any size in a magazine. The camera is almost never the problem.
Why a double-page spread gets away with less
The table’s last row asks for more than most phones give. A 12-megapixel phone photograph is about 4,000 pixels on its long side, not 4,800, which works out at roughly 240 to the inch across a full A4 spread.
In practice that still prints well, because a spread is looked at from further away — held at arm’s length, or lying open on a table between two people. Three hundred to the inch is the figure for something inspected up close, like a small print in the hand. The rule bends with the size of the picture and the distance it is seen from. It does not bend for compression, which is the real problem.
How to check a photograph’s size on your phone
No software needed.
On an iPhone, open the photograph in Photos and swipe up, or tap the small i button. The details show the pixel dimensions — 4032 × 3024, for example — with the camera and the date.
On most Android phones, open it in the gallery or Google Photos and swipe up. The details panel lists the megapixels and the dimensions.
On a laptop, right-click the file and look under its properties, or Get Info on a Mac.
Take the larger number and divide by 300. That is roughly how many inches it can print across comfortably. A file 1,280 pixels wide is about four inches: half the width of an A4 page, not the whole of it.
The problem is almost always the messaging app
Sending a picture as a normal image on a messaging app compresses it, often to around 1,000 pixels on the long edge and sometimes less. That is fine small and visibly soft across a full page.
Send photographs as a Document rather than a Photo. Same app, same chat, no compression. It is the highest-value thing in this entire guide and it costs one extra tap. The step-by-step →
Or skip the chat altogether: the upload link on your order-confirmation page and email takes the files at full size.
The same applies to anything that has been through a social platform. A picture saved from someone’s profile is a compressed copy of a compressed copy.
Cropping spends resolution too
Every crop throws pixels away, and it is easy to forget when you ask for one face out of a group. A photograph 4,000 pixels wide of ten people, cropped to the grandmother at the left end, might leave 600 or 700 pixels across her — plenty for a small image, nowhere near enough for a full page.
Zooming while you take the picture does the same thing before the file even exists. Beyond their built-in telephoto lens, phones zoom by enlarging a crop of the sensor, so a 10× shot of the stage from the back of a school hall is a large file holding very little detail.
If the photograph you love is a crop of a bigger one, say so when you send it, and expect it to run small.
HEIC, Live Photos, portrait mode and night mode
HEIC is the format recent iPhones save in by default. It is the camera’s original file, not a chat app’s compressed copy, and the upload link accepts it alongside JPG and PNG, so there is nothing to convert.
Live Photos carry a few seconds of video, but the still frame is the full-resolution photograph, and that is what prints.
Frames taken from a video are a different matter: a 1080p frame is 1,920 pixels across, so it suits a smaller placement than a photograph does. Video stills as printed photos →
Portrait mode blurs the background in software. On a phone screen it looks convincing; on paper, the edge of the blur can show around hair, glasses and raised hands. Worth a close look on the proof.
Night mode brightens a dark scene by combining several frames, and fine detail can come out smoothed.
A good test for any of them: zoom the photograph to full size on your phone. What you see at that magnification is roughly what a full-page print will show.
Files that cannot be rescued
Some sources are small at origin and no amount of care recovers them.
Screenshots of photographs. A screenshot is capped at your screen’s resolution, which is far below the original. Find the original instead.
Pictures from very old phones, or scanned on a low setting. Sometimes 600 pixels is genuinely all there is.
Anything downloaded from a website. Web images are deliberately small.
For these the answer is placement rather than software: at postcard size a small file is fine, across a spread it is not. We flag which of yours fall into that bracket before anything prints, which is part of what the proof is for.
What the design proof shows you →
Old printed photographs
Photographing a print with your phone works better than most people expect, and better than a cheap scanner.
Flat surface, daylight from a window, no flash, the phone parallel to the photograph rather than at an angle, and fill the frame. A phone photograph of a 1980s print taken that way prints perfectly well at half-page size.
Frequently asked
What resolution do I need for a photo book? About 300 pixels per printed inch, so 1,200 pixels wide for a half-page image and 2,400 for a full page. Modern phone photographs comfortably exceed both.
Why do my photos look blurry when printed? Almost always compression in transit rather than the original file. Sending as a Photo rather than a Document is the usual cause.
How do I send photos without losing quality? Attach them as a Document instead of a Photo. That bypasses compression entirely.
Can you use screenshots? Only at small sizes. A screenshot is limited to your screen resolution, which is well below the original photograph.
What about old printed photos? Photograph them flat in daylight without flash, filling the frame. That beats a cheap scanner and prints well at moderate sizes.
Part of our complete photo magazine guide. See also: using blurry photographs on purpose, choosing photos for polaroid prints, paper and printing explained and how to choose photos. Designing a magazine yourself to send us as a PDF? The same numbers apply: get your magazine printed.
Ready when you are: Photo magazines from ₹499 · Polaroid prints from ₹270