What makes a picture print well

Send the biggest version you have

This is the whole guide in one line. A print is unforgiving of an image that was already small when you found it, and nothing we do afterwards puts back detail that was never in the file.

The original off a phone or a camera is almost always right. What is usually wrong is a copy of a copy: a picture saved from a message, lifted off a social account, or screenshotted from another screen. Each of those steps throws away detail to save space, and the result can look perfectly good on a phone and still be too soft to print at the size of a t-shirt front.

We look at every image before it is printed, and we will tell you if what you sent will not hold up. That is not an automatic check that passes or fails; it is somebody looking.

What happens to your file when it arrives

Every image is decoded and re-encoded the moment it reaches us, so what we store is the picture and nothing else. That strips the metadata cameras write into a file, including the make and model of the phone and, on most phones, the coordinates where you were standing.

Any rotation the camera recorded is applied to the pixels before that tag is dropped, so a portrait photo does not arrive sideways. The photos policy has the rest of what we do and do not do with it.

For a figurine, the photo is the model

A chocolate figurine is sculpted from one photo, so that photo is doing more work than a print does. Stand back and get all of yourself in the frame, in a pose you like. Head and shoulders still works; a close-up of a face gives us the least to build from.

• One person, facing the camera, from the waist up or head to toe.
• Even light, nothing covering the face, and no strong shadow across it.
• A phone photo taken indoors is usually fine.
• Sunglasses, hats and other people in the frame are what most often spoil it.

What prints badly, whatever the resolution

• A photo of a face on an all-over print. The design runs over the shoulders and past the side seams, and a face does not survive being wrapped round a body.
• Fine detail on the color-change mugs. The print appears as the mug warms, and small features are lost in the reveal; choose an image with strong shapes.
• Anything intricate on a cap. The front panel has room for one idea, so a mark works and a picture does not.
• Photographic detail in embroidery. Thread does a name, a small mark or a simple shape; anything with many colors wants a print.

Whose picture you may send

Yours, or one you have permission to use. For a photo of a person that means it is you or they have agreed; for a child, that you are their parent or guardian; for artwork, a logo or a character, that you own it or may reproduce it. The photos policy is the full version, and it is short.