Photos that work

What to shoot

Your phone camera is enough. What makes a menu photo work is light and distance, not the camera.

• Daylight from a window. Turn off the overhead lights; they make everything yellow. Stand so the window is to one side of the plate, not behind you.
• One item per photo, on a plain plate or board. A full display case reads as a blur on a phone screen.
• Fill the frame. Get close enough that the item is most of the picture. Do not zoom; step in.
• Wipe the lens first. Most soft, hazy photos are a smudged lens.

Five to start

You do not need a photo for every item on day one. Five is enough to publish: the five things people order most, or the five that look best. Items without a photo still appear in the menu; add the rest over the following weeks.

A page holds 40 photos on Free and 300 on Plus. Replacing a photo does not count twice.

Size and format

PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 5 MB each. A phone photo is usually 2 to 4 MB, so it fits without resizing. If an upload is refused for size, the photo is probably a scan or a camera export; open it in Photos and share it to yourself, which makes a smaller copy.

If an iPhone photo is refused as HEIC, export or share a JPEG copy and upload that.

Crops

Item photos show in tiles that are close to square. A tall or wide photo has its edges cut off, so keep the item in the middle of the frame with a little room around it, and it will survive the crop. Shooting in the camera’s square mode takes the guesswork out.

Your logo is the exception: it is shown whole, not cropped. A PNG with a transparent background looks best in the top bar.

What not to upload

• Screenshots with text on them — a photographed menu, an Instagram post with a caption, a flyer. The text is unreadable at tile size and gets cut by the crop.
• Stock images. Visitors can tell, and you usually do not have the right to use them on a page that sells things.
• Another shop’s photos, for the same reason, and because it is grounds for a report.
• Things you no longer sell. A photo of a cake you stopped making is an order you have to turn down.

Replacing a photo

Open the item in your dashboard, tap its photo, and choose the new one. The old photo goes away when you save. Item changes appear on an already-live menu without publishing a new design version. For page layout and draft-versus-live behavior, see What your page needs before it goes live.

Also see

• What your page needs before it goes live
• Where the order button can point
• Menus in any language
• Plans, founding shops, and cancelling
• Pricing — the three plans side by side
• Support — how to reach us, and the questions we get most