Help & Support

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Minimum required resolution for printing: Size does matter.


When you submit your images for printing we carefully review each one and compare it to the minimum size required to make a good-looking print. If your photo’s resolution is too low to print well at any size, we’ll let you know by flagging it with an indicator in the album, and you won’t be able to place a print order for that image. Sorry, but we just can’t produce a bad print.


The minimum resolution that we will print is 100 dpi (dots per inch); however if you really want the best possible print quality (and who doesn’t?) we recommend 300 dpi. It works like this: the lower the resolution, the less detail is contained in your image. Large prints of images with low resolution appear blurry and blocky, kind of like the people on the TV news who don’t want their faces shown. Not a good look.


Here’s a handy table that will show the image resolution for some of our standard print sizes at a glance. (Note: since pixel resolutions are usually given with the wider dimension of the image aspect ratio first, that’s how we’ve set up our table.)


Print size

Optimal resolution for good print quality (300px per inch)

Minimum resolution, less optimal image quality (100px per inch)

3.5x5

1500 x 1050

500 x 350

4x5

1500 x 1200

500 x 400

4x6

1800 x 1200

600 x 400

4x12

3600 x 1200

400 x 1200

5x5

1500 x 1500

500 x 500

5x7

2100 x 1500

700 x 500

6x9

2700 x 1800

900 x 600

8x10

3000 x 2400

1000 x 800

8.5x11

3300 x 2550

1100 x 850

8x12

3600 x 2400

1200 x 800

9x12

3600 x 2700

1200 x 900

10x10

3000 x 3000

1000 x 1000

11x14

4200 x 3300

1400 x 1100

12x12

3600 x 3600

1200 x 1200

12x18

5400 x 3600

1800 x 1200

16x20

4800 x 6000

1600 x 2000

16x24

4800 x 7200

1600 x 2400

20x24

6000 x 7200

2000 x 2400

20x30

6000 x 9000

2000 x 3000

24x36

7200 x 10800

2400 x 3600