Practical
Choosing the right photo for a tile
The photo that looks best on your phone is often not the one that works on a 15 cm square of ceramic. Here is what to look for.
3 min read
A tile is small, square and permanent. That combination punishes some photographs and flatters others, and it is not always the ones you would expect. A slightly imperfect snapshot with a clear subject usually beats a technically better photo with too much going on.
The tile is square. Your photo is not.
Phone photos are tall rectangles. Tiles are squares, in 15 by 15 or 20 by 20 centimetres. Something has to go, and it will come off the top and bottom of a portrait shot or the sides of a landscape one.
So look at your photo and imagine a square over the middle of it. Does the subject survive? A group shot spread across a wide frame will not. A face, a dog, a house front usually will. Crop in the designer rather than hoping, so you can see exactly what stays.
Resolution, and what actually matters
Any photo taken with a phone from the last decade has enough pixels for a 15 cm tile. The problem is almost never the camera. It is what happened to the file afterwards.
- A photo forwarded through a messaging app has usually been compressed hard. Ask for the original from the person who took it.
- A screenshot of a photo is a photo of a screen. It is a fresh, lower-quality copy.
- A picture saved from social media has been resized twice by someone else.
- A scanned print is fine if the scan is sharp; a phone photo of a print in a frame is not.
- A heavy digital zoom is just a crop. If it looked soft on your phone it will look softer at 15 cm.
Faces belong near the centre
The design frames your image, so the very edges and corners of the photo carry the least attention and are the first thing to be lost in a crop. Anything that matters, faces above all, should sit comfortably inside the middle of the square.
For a portrait, aim for the face to fill a decent share of the frame. A person standing in the middle distance in front of a building becomes a small figure at this size, and the building wins.
Light does more than megapixels
Even, soft light is what you want: an overcast day, open shade, or indoors near a window. Harsh midday sun puts hard shadows across faces, and hard shadows become solid dark shapes at tile size.
Backlit photos, where the light is behind the subject, are the most common failure. Your eye compensates when you take them. The print does not.
What happens when colour becomes cobalt
This is the part people underestimate. Rendered in the Delft-blue idiom, your photograph stops using colour to separate things and uses light and dark instead. Two areas that are obviously different on screen but equally bright, a red jumper against green foliage for instance, collapse into the same shade of blue.
The practical test takes five seconds: turn the photo to black and white on your phone and look again. If the subject still stands out clearly, it will work. If it disappears into the background, choose another photo or a different crop. A photo tile lives or dies on that tonal separation.
Backgrounds that ruin a good photo
Busy backgrounds are the second most common problem. A hedge, a bookcase, a crowd, a patterned wallpaper: all of them add detail that competes with the subject at exactly the scale where there is no room for competition. Plain walls, sky, sand, grass and water are all excellent.
A last check before you order
- Look at the preview at the actual size of the tile, not full screen.
- Convert to black and white and confirm the subject still separates.
- Check nothing important is touching an edge of the square.
- Confirm you are using the original file, not a forwarded copy.
- Choose the larger size if the photo has fine detail you want kept.
Once the tile arrives, the next decision is where it goes: see hanging and caring for a tile. Anything else about files, sizes and options is answered in the frequently asked questions.