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MemorialPrintKit

How do you photograph an old print with a phone so it prints well?

Lay the print flat in bright indirect daylight, hold the phone directly above it so the print fills the frame with the edges square, turn the flash off, tap the print to set focus, and take several. Done carefully, a 12 megapixel phone photograph of a 5x7 print holds about 576 pixels per inch of the original — close to what a 600 DPI flatbed scan gives you.

Five steps, in order

None of these needs anything but the phone and a window. Together they decide most of how the copy prints.

  1. Light it with a window, not a lamp or the flash. Put the print on a table near a window on an overcast day, or in shade on a bright one. Direct sun and overhead bulbs both make a hot spot. The flash puts a mirror of itself in the middle of the photograph and will ruin every attempt.
  2. Get square to it. Hold the phone flat above the print, parallel to it, and move until the four edges of the print line up with the four edges of the frame. A photograph taken at an angle has to be straightened later, and straightening throws away pixels and softens what is left.
  3. Fill the frame. Move the phone closer until the print nearly touches the edges of the screen. Every pixel spent on the tablecloth is a pixel not spent on the face. Move closer rather than zooming in: between a phone’s fixed lenses, zoom is a crop, which is the same as filling the frame badly.
  4. Tap to focus, then check an eye. Tap the print to set focus and exposure, then zoom into an eye on the preview. Phones focus on whatever they take to be the subject, and a flat rectangle confuses them more often than you would expect.
  5. Take five or six. It costs nothing. Hand shake is easy to miss, and you cannot tell which one is sharp on a phone screen.

How a phone compares with a scanner

Resolution first. A 12 megapixel phone photograph is 3024x4032 pixels. If the long edge spans a 7 inch print, that is 576 pixels per inch — nearly twice the 300 DPI print standard, and close to the 600 DPI a careful flatbed scan uses. On a wallet-size print of 2.5x3.5 inches, the same photograph is over 1100 DPI equivalent.

Where a scanner still wins is flatness and even light. A curled or buckled print will never be fully sharp corner to corner from a phone, and a scanner does not care. If the print is badly curled, put it under glass — a picture frame with the back removed works — and photograph it through that, with the glass angled slightly so it does not reflect the ceiling.

What a scanner cannot fix is what the print itself does not contain. A print made from a 110 or Instamatic negative holds a limited amount of detail whatever you copy it with, and scanning it at 1200 DPI usually produces a very large file with little more in it than a 600 DPI one.

Glass, glare and frames

If the photograph is already in a frame, take it out. Photographing through the frame’s glass costs you contrast and adds a reflection of the room, and both are avoidable in ten seconds.

If a print is stuck to the glass — which happens with old frames in humid houses — stop and do not pull. Photograph it in the frame at an angle to the window so the glare falls outside the picture area, and treat separating it as a job for after the funeral.

Then check what you got

Put the best of your attempts through the free print-size check. It reports the pixel dimensions and the largest size that prints cleanly, so you can tell straight away whether the copy is good enough for the easel print or only for the program.

If the answer is disappointing, it is usually the framing rather than the phone — a print occupying half the frame yields a quarter of the pixels of one that fills it. That is worth one more attempt before deciding the photograph cannot do the size.

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Last updated 2026-09-10.