What Resolution Does a Photo Need for a Blanket?

Less than you would need for paper, and it depends on how big the photo will be on the fabric rather than how big the blanket is. Here are the actual numbers.

The short answer

Count the pixels across the photo and divide by the number of inches it will cover on the blanket. At 110 pixels per inch or more, a blanket prints sharp. Between 60 and 110 it is usable and a little soft: fine from a few feet away, which is how a blanket is usually seen. Below 60 it looks blurry, and our builder will not let it through.

The 300 pixels per inch rule you may have read is for paper held at reading distance. Fabric has a pile that softens the print slightly on its own, so the extra detail is never seen.

One photo covering the whole blanket

This is the demanding case: a single photograph printed edge to edge. Pixels are counted across the short side of the blanket.

A 12 megapixel photo is 3,024 by 4,032 pixels, which is what most phones produced for years. A 48 megapixel photo is 6,048 pixels across, enough for every size. So for one photo across the largest blanket, an older phone photo is not enough, and a design that uses several smaller photos is the better choice.

Design by design

Most designs do not stretch one photo across the whole blanket, so they need far fewer pixels. This is the minimum width, in pixels, of the largest photo in each of our designs, followed by the width at which it prints sharp. Both are measured across the part of the photo that fills the frame.

The Family Name and Woodland Birth designs use no photo at all, so resolution never comes into it.

What shrinks a photo before you upload it

Most blurry blankets start with a photo that was sharp once. These are the usual ways it loses its pixels:

• Messaging apps. A photo sent through a chat app is often compressed to a fraction of its original size. Ask for it by email, a shared album, or AirDrop instead.
• Screenshots. A screenshot is only as large as the screen it was taken on, whatever the original was.
• Photos saved from social media. These are resized on upload and again on download.
• Zooming in. Enlarging a photo inside its frame to twice the size halves its resolution. The builder recalculates as you zoom.
• A sideways photo in an upright frame. A landscape photo cropped to fill a portrait blanket only uses the middle of the picture, so fewer of its pixels reach the fabric.

How to check a photo's size

On an iPhone, open the photo and swipe up, or tap the information button, to see its dimensions in pixels. In Google Photos, swipe up on the photo for the same details. On a computer, the file's properties show it. The first number of the pair is the width.

Old printed photographs

A print can be photographed with a phone. Lay it flat in daylight, keep the phone parallel to it, and fill the screen with the print. The result has plenty of pixels; how sharp it looks depends on the print itself, and an old photograph that is slightly soft will stay slightly soft. Smaller placements are kinder to it than a full blanket.

What our builder does with all this

You do not have to do the arithmetic. When you upload a photo, the builder works out its real printed resolution for the design and size you picked and shows it under the photo: too low to print well, usable and a little soft, good, or excellent. Change the blanket size or zoom the photo and the reading updates. A photo that is too low is blocked before checkout, not discovered after delivery, and every photo order is checked by a person before it prints.

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