Thuisbezorgd photo specs in 2026: dimensions, format, and 5 examples that convert

The photos on a Thuisbezorgd listing do more work than the menu copy. We watch new restaurants move three or four positions up the category rankings within a week of replacing the phone snapshots they uploaded at signup with five clean photos. Same menu, same prices, better photos.

Thuisbezorgd is part of Just Eat Takeaway, and Just Eat publishes the photo guidelines both platforms follow. Below are the dimensions and rules current in 2026, the unwritten ways photos get suppressed even when they pass review, and five styles we see working across our customer accounts.

Thuisbezorgd photo dimensions and aspect ratio

Single-dish photos are landscape, 3:2, with a minimum of 1200 by 800 pixels, per Just Eat Takeaway's partner guidelines. Bundle and hero images sit at 16:9 with a minimum of 1920 by 1080 pixels.

The platform crops a 1:1 square from the centre of single-dish photos for some surfaces, including search cards and mobile thumbnails, and shows the full landscape on the dish detail page. Leave breathing room around the plate so the square crop does not slice into the food.

JPEG or PNG, sRGB colour, under 10 MB. Anything portrait, anything HEIC, anything in a wide-gamut profile gets either rejected at upload or downgraded by the pipeline. If your account dashboard shows different numbers from these, follow the dashboard. Platforms tweak specs without announcing it.

Common reasons Thuisbezorgd rejects food photos

The merchant guidelines list the obvious bans on faces, hands, watermarks, text overlays, and raw ingredients in plate shots. In practice we see a few less-obvious patterns get pulled or quietly downweighted:

Hands or fingers near the plate, common in selfie-style shots taken at the pass. Multiple dishes in one frame on a single-item upload, where the bundle slot is the right place for that. Heavy retouching that looks unnatural, including aggressive shadow burning and obvious cloning. Plates pressed against the edge of the frame, where the automatic crop slices into the food.

Even if a photo passes review, low contrast at thumbnail size is the silent killer. A dark sauce on a black plate disappears at 200 pixels wide, and a 200-pixel-wide image is the whole purchase decision on mobile.

Five food photo styles that convert on Thuisbezorgd

We track which styles convert in our own testing. None of these is universally the right answer, and the best style depends on the dish.

The clean overhead shot on a white or light grey surface works for almost everything that sits flat on the plate: pizza, bowls, salads, curries. Soft daylight from one side, no direct sun. It fails on tall food where overhead flattens the structure, so burgers and club sandwiches need a different angle.

The 45-degree restaurant shot puts the camera at plate height looking slightly down, with a centred plate and a soft blur on the back third. Most restaurants try to imitate this with iPhone Portrait Mode, and that works fine if the lighting is honest. It is the safest default for hot main dishes.

The warm wood-grain shot uses a walnut or oak surface, light leaning slightly toward tungsten, and the dish placed off-centre. Pasta, stews, and comfort food look right in this style. The risk is overdoing the warmth: at thumbnail size an orange tint reads as bad lighting, not as cosy.

The cut-section shot, with a burger sliced in half, a sandwich showing its layers, or a pie with one slice lifted, consistently outperforms whole-product photos for stacked food. Customers want to see what is inside, and a cross-section is the only way to show that on a delivery app.

The bundle overhead is the right pattern for combo menus, family meals, and sharing platters. Multiple components arranged on one surface, two or three garnishes, every item visible. This only works when the customer literally receives every item shown. Anything else turns into a complaint thread on the listing.

How to take Thuisbezorgd photos without a photographer

Most independent restaurants don't have one, and that is fine. There are three reasonable options, in order of cost.

A clean iPhone shot in window light, cropped to 3:2 in the Photos app, beats most studio shots taken in bad lighting. Shoot near a window between 10:00 and 14:00, no direct sun, manual exposure if your camera app supports it, then crop before uploading.

One photographer session per year runs €500 to €1,500 in a typical Dutch studio depending on the number of dishes covered. Worth it for a stable menu, hard to justify if your menu changes monthly.

AI generation per dish is what FoodPic.ai does. You photograph each dish once with your phone, the AI creates a clean studio version in your chosen style, and the export comes out at the 1200 by 800 ratio Thuisbezorgd expects. Around €25 a month for a typical thirty-dish menu. The Menu Scanner processes a paper menu in under an hour.

We are not going to pretend AI is the right answer for every restaurant. A Michelin-aspirant tasting menu deserves a real photographer. For most delivery-focused operations the speed advantage matters more than the quality ceiling, and AI gets close enough.

How to measure if your Thuisbezorgd photos are working

Click-through from search is the first signal. The merchant portal shows views against orders. A real photo upgrade should move the ratio within seven to ten days. If it does not, the photos are technically fine but not winning the thumbnail.

Open your menu on a phone in the customer app and look at the thumbnails alongside competitors. If you cannot identify the dish in 1.5 seconds, customers cannot either. The thumbnail is the test.

The last test we run is a Tuesday at 19:00. Raining, hungry customer scrolling fast. Does the dish stand out, or does it blur into the next listing? That is the same shape of decision a customer is making, and it matches what the algorithm rewards.

What to do when Thuisbezorgd rejects your photo

When Thuisbezorgd rejects a photo the reason is usually generic ("does not meet our guidelines"). It is almost always one of: hands in frame, watermark, multiple dishes on a single-item slot, wrong aspect ratio, or obvious heavy retouching. Re-shoot or re-export rather than reuploading the same file with a new name. The platform deduplicates by image hash.

If you want to skip the hardware and the photographer, FoodPic.ai exports directly at the dimensions Thuisbezorgd uses. Three free credits is enough to test it on one dish before deciding anything.