How to print photos from your phone

Will your photo actually print well

Almost certainly yes, and this is the part people worry about needlessly. Print resolution is usually quoted at 300 pixels per inch for photographs held at reading distance, which sets a simple requirement.

A standard 12 megapixel phone photo is 3024 by 4032 pixels, which covers everything up to about 10 by 13 inches at full quality. Large prints are viewed from further away, so the 300ppi rule relaxes as the print grows: a poster at 150ppi looks fine on a wall and impossible at arm's length.

What does not survive is cropping heavily first. Crop a 12 megapixel photo to a quarter of its frame and you have a three megapixel file, which is a 5 by 7 at best.

Where to print from a phone

Four routes, and the right one depends on whether you want the prints today or want them right.

Same day retail. Shutterfly and Snapfish both offer pickup at CVS and Walgreens in the United States, with orders at participating stores ready in as little as an hour, and both chains have their own apps that upload straight from your camera roll. Common sizes including 4x6, 5x7 and 8x10 are available for same day collection. Quality is machine-dependent and consistency between stores varies, but for a set of 4x6 prints for an album it is hard to beat on convenience.

Online photo labs. Shutterfly, Snapfish and the more photographer-oriented labs post prints to you in a few days, offer more paper choices, and generally give more consistent colour than a retail kiosk. This is the route for anything you intend to frame.

Home printing. A dedicated dye-sublimation photo printer produces genuinely good small prints and costs per sheet. A general purpose inkjet on plain paper does not, whatever the packaging says.

Instant printers. Pocket printers that make sticker-sized or credit-card-sized prints over bluetooth. The output is low resolution by any standard and the appeal is entirely the object, not the image quality. Judge them as a craft item rather than as a print service.

Phone photos are the wrong shape for print sizes

This is the fault behind most disappointing phone prints, and it is entirely predictable. Phone cameras shoot 4:3 by default. Standard print sizes are 2:3 for 4x6, 5:7 for 5x7 and 4:5 for 8x10. None of those match, so something has to be cut.

If you do not crop, the lab does, usually by centring and trimming the long edge. On a portrait that often means the top of a head or the bottom of a chin, and on a group photo it means the person on the end. Labs also allow a small trim tolerance at the edges, so anything close to the frame edge is at risk even when the ratio matches.

The practical answer is to leave room when you shoot anything you might print, and to crop to the print ratio yourself before ordering. If a photo genuinely cannot be cropped without damage, ask for a bordered print, where the whole frame is printed inside a white margin instead of being trimmed to fill.

Which file to send

Send the largest, least handled version you have. In practice that means going into your photo library and selecting the photo itself, not a version that has been through a chat app, a social feed or a download folder.

Format. Most labs and retail kiosks expect JPEG. iPhones shoot HEIC by default, and while iOS usually converts on the way out, uploads through a web browser sometimes do not. If a lab rejects your file or shows a blank thumbnail, that is almost always the cause, and the fix is covered in HEIC vs JPEG.

Resolution. Do not resize. This is the one context where you want every pixel you have, and a 1080 pixel social export will print at 4x6 only if you accept visible softness.

RAW. If you shot ProRAW, export a high quality JPEG for the lab rather than sending the DNG. Labs do not process raw files, and their automatic handling of an unprocessed one will not flatter it. Whether it was worth shooting raw in the first place is a separate question, answered in should I shoot raw on iPhone.

Colour. Export in sRGB unless the lab explicitly asks for something else. Almost all consumer printing pipelines assume it.

Edit for paper, not for a screen

A phone screen is a light source. Paper is a surface that reflects whatever light is in the room. That difference means an edit that looks correct on a phone frequently prints too dark and too contrasty, and it is the most common complaint about prints that were technically fine.

Three adjustments before you order:

• Lift the shadows a little. Deep blacks that read as moody on a bright screen turn into a featureless dark patch on paper. Open them until you can see detail without flattening the photo.
• Ease back the saturation. Inks cannot reproduce the most intense colours a screen can display, and over-saturated reds and blues print as flat blocks with no gradation. Vivid skies and bright clothing suffer most.
• Check the brightness at low screen brightness. Turn the display down to about a third and look at the photo again. That is much closer to how it will look on paper.

Heavy filters are worth reconsidering entirely. A strong fade or a crushed film look is a screen aesthetic, and on paper it often just looks like a badly printed photograph. If you like the look, print one and see before you print the set.

Why prints come back disappointing

In rough order of frequency, with the fix.

The wrong file was sent. A copy from a messaging app or a screenshot, both of which are a fraction of the original resolution. Always start in your photo library.

The photo was cropped by the machine. Covered above. Crop yourself, or order bordered prints.

It printed darker than expected. The screen versus paper problem. Lift the shadows and midtones before ordering.

Skin came out orange or grey. A white balance error that was already in the photo. Print will not hide it, and the fix is in the edit rather than at the lab. The orange skin tone guide covers the correction.

It is soft or noisy. A grainy low light photo shrinks acceptably on a screen and prints at actual size, where the noise becomes obvious. Why are my photos grainy explains the causes, and the honest answer is often to print it smaller.

Colours differ from the last order. Different labs and different machines. If you found a lab whose prints you liked, keep using it, because consistency between services is poor.