Explainer·six minutes
What full resolution actually means, how to check whether the file you were given is big enough to print, and why so many photos look fine on a phone and disappointing at 8 × 10.
A photo that prints well needs roughly 300 pixels for every inch of paper. A standard 4 × 6 print therefore wants about 1200 × 1800 pixels. Any photo from a phone of the last decade clears that easily — if it arrives intact.
The problem is almost never the camera. It is that most ways of sending a photo shrink it first, and by the time it reaches the person who wants to print it, half the pixels are gone and nobody noticed.
Pixel counts for a good print at 300 ppi. The right-hand column is the honest floor — at 200 ppi a print is still perfectly acceptable at arm’s length, which is how photos on a wall are actually looked at.
| Print size | Ideal pixels | Gets away with | In practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 × 6 in | 1200 × 1800 | 800 × 1200 | Any phone photo. Even a well-sent text message usually survives this. |
| 5 × 7 in | 1500 × 2100 | 1000 × 1400 | Comfortable for anything shot in the last ten years. |
| 8 × 10 in | 2400 × 3000 | 1600 × 2000 | Where compressed copies start to show. The original is needed. |
| 11 × 14 in | 3300 × 4200 | 2200 × 2800 | A 12-megapixel phone photo lands a little under 300 ppi here — fine, with nothing spare for cropping. |
| 16 × 20 in | 4800 × 6000 | 3200 × 4000 | Needs a recent high-resolution camera, or accepting 200 ppi. |
Cropping spends pixels. Cutting a photo down to the middle third leaves you with a third of the resolution, so crop before you decide what size to print.
Thirty seconds, and it tells you whether it is worth taking to a print shop.
On an iPhone or iPad: open the photo, swipe up on it, and the dimensions and file size appear underneath. Look for a number in the thousands.
On Android: open the photo, tap the three dots, then Details or Info. Same thing to look for.
On a computer: right-click the file and choose Get Info on a Mac or Properties on Windows.
Two rough signals that something has been shrunk: a file under about half a megabyte, or a width under 1000 pixels. Either means you are looking at a copy, not the photo.
Four places a photo gets quietly reduced between your camera and someone else’s hands.
The most common one. A screenshot of a photo is only as big as the screen it was on — typically a fraction of the original. Always find the real file.
Most messaging compresses images to keep them quick to send. Some offer a document or original-quality option, which is worth finding.
Anything saved back off a social platform has been through its resizing. It will look fine on a phone and soft on paper.
Saving an image by long-pressing what is on screen often gets you the display copy rather than the file behind it. Use the download button where there is one.
If someone has sent you one of our cards, this is all there is to it.
You can also save the entire card — message, voice note and photos — as a single file that opens with no internet, and the photos inside it are the full-size ones rather than previews. Worth doing regardless of whether you print anything: keeping a card forever. If the sender marked the card view-only, that button is not offered.
One limit worth knowing about: photo downloads are capped per card, per person, so a link cannot be scraped — five an hour on a free card, ten on one made with a Card Pack. A card carrying the full fifteen photos therefore takes two sittings to save one by one. Saving the whole card as a single file counts as one download, which is the faster route if you want all of them.
A pharmacy or supermarket kiosk is fine for 4 × 6 and 5 × 7, and it is an hour rather than a week. Upload the file you downloaded rather than one from a messaging app.
For anything you intend to frame, an online photo lab is a noticeable step up in paper and colour for a few dollars more. If a service warns you the resolution is low for your chosen size, believe it — go one size down rather than pressing on.
Two things worth knowing. Phone photos are usually 4:3 while 4 × 6 paper is 3:2, so something gets cropped — choose what, or ask for a white border. And a home inkjet will not match a lab; it is for the fridge, not the frame.
If the fridge is all you are after, the printer icon beside the download button in the full-screen view sends the original straight to a printer without saving a file first.
You are the only person who can prevent this. Once a photo has been shrunk, nothing on the receiving end can put the detail back.
Pick the photo from where it lives rather than forwarding one you were sent. Forwards are usually copies of copies.
Especially grandparents, and especially photos of children. When you add a photo to one of our cards a small badge sits on the thumbnail telling you which of the sizes above it clears — 8x10+, 5x7, 4x6, or screen only.
Our cards store the file you picked, untouched, up to five megabytes a photo. Above that we drop the JPEG quality a notch before we touch the pixel count at all, and never below the size a sharp 8 × 10 needs.
The size they were uploaded at. A photo up to five megabytes is stored exactly as it was sent and handed back the same way. Above five megabytes it is trimmed to fit before it ever leaves the sender’s device — JPEG quality first, pixel dimensions only if that is not enough, and never below what a sharp 8 × 10 needs.
Not really. Enlarging invents pixels rather than recovering them; AI upscaling can help a little at small sizes and tends to look artificial on faces. Finding the original is always the better move.
No. It is the standard for something held in the hand. A print on a wall, looked at from a few feet away, is fine at 200 ppi — which is why the middle column of the table exists.
Occasionally — some kiosks want JPEG. Your phone will convert on export, or any photo app can save a copy as JPEG. The resolution is unaffected either way. If you upload a HEIC to one of our cards we convert it to a high-quality JPEG on the way in, at the same pixel dimensions.
No — focus and light matter more than pixel count. But between two copies of the same photo, the larger file is the less-compressed one.
The photos are not printed on the card at all — the card carries the design and your message, with a QR code on the back that opens the digital version where the full-size files live. How printed cards work.
Photos up to five megabytes go through our cards untouched, so whoever receives one can print it. Your first card is free.
Read next
The downloadable card file, and why a link is not the same as keeping something.
Where the download button is, and what else they can keep.
The sender’s side of this: picking the photos that will still print well at the other end.
Getting a photo to someone as a file they own, with no account in the middle.