What size photo do you need for a funeral service?
Three sizes cover almost every service: 8x10 inches for the portrait on the register table, 5x7 for the program, and 20x24 for the easel print at the front. Whether your photograph can fill the larger two depends on its pixel dimensions, not on the file size or how good it looks on a phone.
The three sizes, and where each one goes
8x10 inches is the portrait almost every service uses. It stands on the register table next to the guest book, it fits a frame from any shop with no custom framing and no wait, and it is the size the funeral home will ask you for if they ask for one size.
5x7 inches is the program photograph, and it is also the size most often handed to family members afterwards. Because it is held rather than hung, it is the least forgiving size on sharpness — but it needs so few pixels that almost any photograph can do it.
20x24 inches is the easel print: the one on a stand at the front of the room, beside the flowers. Ask the funeral home which size their easels take before you order anything, because 20x24 and 18x24 are both common and a mat cut for one does not fit the other.
A memorial board print is often 16x20, and that is the size where phone photographs start to struggle. If you are printing several photographs to pin up rather than one portrait, that is the number to plan around.
How many pixels each size needs
At a true 300 DPI — the standard a print shop means when it asks for print resolution — a 5x7 needs 1500x2100 pixels, an 8x10 needs 2400x3000, an 11x14 needs 3300x4200, a 16x20 needs 4800x6000 and a 20x24 needs 6000x7200. Multiply the inches by 300 and you have the answer for any size.
Those numbers are larger than most people expect. A 20x24 at 300 DPI is 43 megapixels, which is more than any phone captures, and a 16x20 is 28.8 megapixels. This is why "it looks fine on my screen" is not a useful test: a phone screen is showing you about two megapixels of a photograph at most.
At 200 DPI each dimension drops by a third, which is under half the pixels: 1600x2000 for an 8x10 and 3200x4000 for a 16x20. 200 DPI is genuinely acceptable for anything seen from a few feet away, which includes the easel print and the memorial board. It is not acceptable for the program, which people hold at reading distance.
What a phone photograph can actually do
A standard 12 megapixel phone photograph is 3024x4032 pixels. Cropped to the 4:5 shape an 8x10 frame needs, that leaves 3024x3780 — comfortably above 300 DPI at 8x10, and a genuinely sharp print.
The same photograph at 16x20 gives you about 189 DPI, and at 20x24 about 151 DPI. Both are below the 200 DPI line, and the second is low enough to be visible as softness from a few feet away. This is the single most useful thing to know before ordering an easel print from a phone photograph.
The crop is why those numbers are lower than dividing pixels by inches suggests. A phone sensor is 3:4 and a frame is 4:5, so something has to come off the top and bottom before the print is made. Our print-size check subtracts the crop first and reports what the paper actually receives, which is usually a little worse than the figure a DPI calculator gives you.
Finding out about your own photograph
The free print-size check reads the photograph on your own computer and tells you the largest size it prints cleanly at, size by size, with the crop already taken off. Nothing is uploaded, and you do not need to pay or make an account to see the verdict.
If the answer is smaller than the size you were planning on, that is worth knowing three days out rather than on the morning of the service. The honest options at that point are a smaller print, a modest enlargement, or a different photograph — all three are covered in the answers linked below.
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Last updated 2026-09-10.