About MemorialPrintKit

MemorialPrintKit exists because of a specific, common and badly served situation: a family has about forty-eight hours to produce a portrait for a funeral, and what they have to work with is a phone snapshot of a 1970s print or a photograph saved off a Facebook profile. What they need is a file that prints cleanly at 8x10 for the register table and at 20x24 for the easel. Everything on this site is aimed at that one job.

It is built and run by SJMSaaS, a small independent software company. There is no venture funding behind it, no sales team, and nobody to escalate to — the contact form reaches the person who writes the code.

Why it works the way it does

The photograph never leaves your computer

Every step — reading the file, checking what it can print at, lifting the person away from the background, cropping 10 sizes, building the ZIP — runs inside your own browser. This was the first decision made and the one everything else follows from. It costs us the ability to help you by looking at your file, and it means there is no server anywhere holding the last good photograph of somebody's mother. That trade is not close.

It also has a plain commercial consequence, which is worth stating rather than dressing up: because nothing is processed on our machines, the marginal cost of running your photograph is zero. That is why the check can be free and why the price is $12 rather than what a service with a server bill has to charge.

The free check is measured on real pixels, never on a hoped-for one

The print-size check reports what the photograph genuinely holds, at both 300 and 200 DPI, with the crop each frame shape costs subtracted before the verdict rather than after. Most calculators divide pixels by inches and give you a figure the paper never receives; ours gives you the one it does, which is usually a little worse.

The enlargement is reported as its own separate figure and is never folded into that check. The check is the first thing anyone sees and the one number on this site that has to be trustworthy. Fold an improvement we hope to achieve into a measurement and it stops being a measurement.

It will not rebuild a face

The enlargement is a general super-resolution pass: it sharpens edges and reconstructs texture, and it buys about one step up the size list. We deliberately do not use a face restoration model, and the reason is the whole argument for the product.

Those models rebuild facial features rather than sharpening them. Given a low-resolution photograph they return a startlingly sharp face that is subtly not the same person — a plausible invention where the eyes and the mouth used to be. Handing a grieving family a portrait of somebody who is almost their mother is the one failure this product cannot have, so the capability is not here at all rather than being available with a warning.

One price, once, and no subscription

$12 for one photograph, in whole dollars, with no account. You need this once in a lifetime. A subscription sold to somebody with a single job to do is one they have to remember to cancel while they are grieving, and that is not a thing to build whatever it would earn.

What it deliberately does not do

It is not a memorial page or a guest book. There is nothing to sign, nothing hosted, and no link to share. That is a different and well-funded category; if that is what you are looking for, several companies do it properly and this is not one of them.

It does not restore damaged photographs. Tears, creases, water damage, heavy fading and color casts are a different craft, and doing it well needs a person looking at the photograph. If your original is damaged, a photo restorer is the right person to see first. What this does is the print preparation of an intact photograph: the arithmetic, the background, the crops, and files a print shop will take.

It does not sell to funeral homes. The site speaks to families, and the pricing and the copy are built for somebody doing this once rather than for somebody doing it every week.

Naming the boundary is worth more than another feature. It stops the wrong person buying, which is the most expensive kind of sale, and it makes every other claim on this site easier to believe.

Checking any of this

Everything above is testable from outside. Put a photograph through the free check with your network tools open and you will see no request carrying the image. Read the privacy page for the complete list of third parties involved, which runs to five. The 6 pages under answers give the arithmetic in full so you can check our numbers against anybody else's.

If something on this site is wrong, or if the tool will not do what it says it does, say so. Corrections are more useful than compliments.