What makes a good photo
You do not need a camera. A phone photo taken near a window beats a professional shot taken in the dark. Here is what actually matters.
Do this
- Face the camera. Head-on or a slight angle. Both eyes visible.
- Use daylight. Near a window, or outside in shade. Overcast days are excellent.
- Get the whole head in. Ears included, with a little space above them. This is the single most common problem we see — especially with shepherds, corgis and any cat.
- Fill the frame. The head should take up a good part of the photo. Crop later if you need to, but start close.
- Keep it sharp. If you zoom in on their eyes and they are blurry, we cannot fix that.
Avoid this
- Direct flash. It flattens the face and turns eyes into mirrors.
- Harsh midday sun. Deep shadows across the muzzle are hard to work with.
- Photos taken from above. The classic phone-pointed-down shot distorts the nose and hides the ears.
- Heavy filters or beauty modes. They smooth away exactly the fur detail that makes it look like your pet.
- Screenshots of photos. They lose too much resolution.
Black dogs and black cats
Dark fur is the hardest case, and most studios quietly do a worse job with it. Shoot in soft, bright light with something light-coloured behind them, and make sure you can see the shape of the face rather than a silhouette. If the preview does not come out right, send us the original and we will look at it ourselves before you order anything.
What we check automatically
The moment you upload, we check the resolution, whether a face is detected and whether the ears are inside the frame. If something is off you get a specific message about what to fix, not a generic error.
More than one pet
Upload one photo per pet. Separate photos are better than one photo of both — it lets us place each of them properly rather than working around whatever pose they happened to be in together.