What are the photo requirements for a funeral program?
A funeral program photograph should be at least 300 DPI at the size it will be printed, which for a typical 5x7 photograph on the cover means 1500x2100 pixels. Programs are held at reading distance, so they are the least forgiving thing at a service — a photograph that looks acceptable on a 20x24 easel print can look visibly soft on a program.
The numbers a printer is asking for
Work out the pixels from the size the photograph will be printed at, not from the size of the program. A photograph printed 5 inches wide needs 1500 pixels across at 300 DPI; one printed 3 inches wide needs 900. If the printer has given you a size in inches, multiply by 300 and that is the requirement.
For a full 5x7 cover photograph, 1500x2100 pixels is the target. Many program printers will accept 200 DPI — 1000x1400 for the same 5x7 — and it is often fine. But the gap between 200 and 300 DPI shows more on a held page than on anything else at a service.
Send a JPEG or a PNG at the full pixel dimensions, not a resized copy. If your software offers a quality setting, use the highest one. Do not send a PDF unless the printer asks for one, and do not paste the photograph into a Word document — that step alone commonly reduces an image to 96 or 220 DPI without saying so.
Why a program is stricter than the easel print
Viewing distance is the whole reason. A print is judged by how much detail lands on your retina, so a 20x24 portrait seen from six feet away and a 5x7 program held at fourteen inches need roughly the same detail per degree of vision — which means far more pixels per inch on the small one.
In practice this reverses the intuition most people arrive with. The program feels like the small, easy job and the easel print feels like the demanding one. It is the other way round: 200 DPI is genuinely acceptable at 18x24 and 20x24, and on a program it is where softness starts to show.
The photograph is smaller than that
Then the program is the part of the service most likely to still work, because it needs the fewest pixels of anything. A 5x7 at 300 DPI is 3.2 megapixels. Even a photograph saved from Facebook comes close, at about 292 DPI.
If it does not, print the photograph smaller on the page rather than filling the cover with it. A 3x4 photograph at 300 DPI needs only 900x1200 pixels, and a smaller photograph that is sharp reads as a deliberate design choice, where a full-cover photograph that is soft reads as a mistake. This is the one place at a funeral where making something smaller genuinely makes it better.
Checking before you send it
The free print-size check gives you a verdict for 5x7 and every other standard size at both 300 and 200 DPI, computed on the actual file and with the crop for each frame shape already subtracted. It runs on your own computer and the photograph is never uploaded.
It also tells you the largest size the photograph will do cleanly, which is the number to give the funeral home when they ask what they can print.
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Last updated 2026-09-10.