Free forever · No account
Is your photo big enough to print?
Drop a photo in and see the largest size it prints well at, plus an honest verdict for every common print size. No upload, no account, no 300-DPI myth.
Your photos are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to a server.
Is your photo big enough to print?
Drop a photo to check its print size
You get the largest size it prints well at, and the honest verdict for every common size below that.
- iPhone HEIC photos work
- Read where they are. Nothing is converted, and nothing is written back.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Every photo is processed inside this browser tab. No server ever sees it.
- Drop anywhere
- The whole page accepts photos — no need to aim for a small box.
The DPI number in your file is not the one that matters
Almost every tool that offers to "change your photo to 300 DPI" is selling you a metadata edit. The resolution figure stored in a JPEG is a note about intended print size. Editing it changes a few bytes and nothing else — same pixels, same file, same print.
You can watch this happen. Take a photo, set it to 300 DPI in any editor, and the pixel dimensions in the file's properties will be identical to before. Nothing was added, because there is nowhere for a metadata field to keep image detail.
What a print shop actually does is divide your pixels by the inches you ordered. So this tool ignores the tag entirely and reports that division instead.
Printed 8 inches wide
300 DPI
2400 pixels ÷ 8 in
Printed 24 inches wide
100 DPI
2400 pixels ÷ 24 in
The same 2400-pixel file, at two sizes. Its resolution tag never changed, and it was never the variable.
How these grades are set
A flat 300 DPI pass mark is the second thing usually got wrong. How much detail a print needs depends on how close your eye gets to it — nobody examines a poster from 30 centimetres, which is how billboards get away with roughly 20 DPI. So the bar moves with the size:
| Sharp | Good | Passable | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Held in the handTypically read at about 30 cm4 × 6 in · 5 × 7 in · 8 × 10 in · 8.5 × 11 in · A4 | 300 | 240 | 200 |
| Framed on a wallTypically seen from about a metre11 × 14 in · 12 × 18 in · 16 × 20 in | 240 | 180 | 150 |
| Poster sizeTypically seen from two metres or more18 × 24 in · 24 × 36 in | 180 | 150 | 120 |
Figures in effective DPI — measured after the photo is cropped to the print's shape, since cropped-away pixels cannot contribute to the print. Below the "Passable" column the tool says no, because at that point the softness is visible at normal viewing distance.
What this cannot tell you
- Whether the photo is sharp. This measures how many pixels you have, not how much real detail is in them. A blurry or heavily upscaled photo can hold plenty of pixels and still print badly, and no tool can add focus that the lens did not capture.
- Colour accuracy. Prints come out darker and less saturated than a backlit screen suggests. That is a colour-profile question, and it is unrelated to size.
- Your specific lab's requirements. Some printers set their own minimum and will reject a file this tool passes. The grades here are ordinary photographic practice, not any one company's policy.
Common questions
- Will setting my photo to 300 DPI make it print better?
- No. A photo's resolution tag is a note in the file's metadata saying what size it was meant to be printed at. Changing it from 72 to 300 rewrites a few bytes of that note and does not add a single pixel. If a 1000-pixel-wide photo was too small for an 8×10 before, it is exactly as small afterwards — the print driver divides your pixels by the inches you ordered, and never reads the tag.
- So what does decide whether a photo prints well?
- Pixels divided by inches. A 3000-pixel edge printed across 10 inches gives 300 pixels per inch; the same edge across 20 inches gives 150. That is the only calculation on this page, and it is why the tool asks for nothing but the file.
- Why does my photo pass at 4×6 but fail at 8×10?
- Two reasons stack up. The bigger print spreads the same pixels over more than three times the area, and 8×10 is a different shape from most camera photos, so part of the frame is cropped away before printing and those pixels stop counting. The checker measures the cropped result, which is what the print shop will actually produce.
- Is 150 DPI good enough?
- It depends entirely on the size, which is why a single pass mark is misleading. 150 DPI on a 16×20 hung on a wall looks fine, because you stand a metre away from it. The same 150 DPI on a 5×7 held at reading distance looks soft. This tool grades against the distance each size is normally viewed from rather than one global number.
- My photo says it is too small. What are my options?
- Find the original. Photos lose pixels when they are emailed, saved from a chat app, downloaded from a marketplace listing, or screenshotted — the copy on your desktop is often a fraction of what the camera produced. Failing that, print smaller: the table on each result names every size the file does reach, along with the pixel count each size it missed would have needed.
- Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
- No. The checking runs inside this browser tab, and nothing is sent to a server — there is no server to send it to. You can confirm it: open your browser's network inspector, drop in a photo, and watch that no request goes out while it is measured.
More free photo tools
All of them run on your own device, all of them are free, and none of them ask who you are.