Photo Mugs

How to get the best from your photo mug

We print 100's of photo mugs every week so we thought we'd share some of the secrets to making sure your mug is the best it can be. We always recommend that you check our image guidelines before uploading a photo as different mug styles have different printable areas, but there's a few helpful guidelines that everyone needs to know.

Firstly, the most important thing is the quality and size of the photo. The most common problem we have with supplied images is that they are too small for printing. The image may look fine on your phone screen or even just a little small on your computer, but if it's a thumbnail image, it's never going to look good printed on a mug. One of the easiest ways to quickly check if a photo is too small is to look at the file size. If your file size is under 50KB then you need to find an alternative, if your file is under 100KB then you really need to check the quality. Try opening the image on your computer and filling the screen with the image, if it looks blurry then it's probably not good enough. Remember that a full wrap photo mug is printed at 200 x 80mm so you're photo needs to look good printed at that size. If you can't find a larger photo then make sure you choose one or our tiled or collage mugs as they repeat your photo around the mug so size is less important.

Next thing you need to do is check if the photo mug you select is appropriate to the photo you have. We like to think we're quite good at designing mugs, but we can't stretch your tall portrait photos to wrap around the outside of a wide mug! Portrait photos are better suited to double sided mugs, so either the photo to be repeated both sides, or the photo one side and text the other side. If you pick a full wrap mug please make sure the photo is wider than it is tall.

Finally, make sure you have fun with your mug and make it as personal as you can. We don't charge extra for text, backgrounds or fancy fonts so make the best use of them. If you're creating a mug with a picture of your friend's dog for a gift, make sure you select the doggy paws background and add a message so that she'll always remember it's from you. And make sure you tell us anything special you want doing in the design instructions, all our photo mugs are hand designed so if you want a simple adjustment such as an image cropped or turned black and white we are happy to do this for you.