Each delivery app has different requirements, but manually editing all your food photography for multiple platforms is impractical and resource-intensive. By coordinating your production plan and app compliance rules ahead of time, you can avoid rejection-related delays (and restyling and reshooting images) while scaling your production efforts.
In this guide, we’ll define the key image requirements for popular food delivery apps like DoorDash and Deliveroo, and show you how Photoroom can strengthen visual consistency and help you create compliant image production workflows for your food delivery sales.
Table of contents:
Why your menu photos affect delivery revenue
Food delivery app images directly affect how customers perceive and order from your menu; 95% of millennial and 90% of Gen Z DoorDash customers say that in-app food photos influence what they purchase. DoorDash also found that reaching 50% menu photo coverage lifts sales by around 13% on average. When you include compliant menu photos that make your food look accurately delicious, you’re more likely to increase platform visibility, convert more orders, and inspire customer trust.
Manual editing processes for food photography can be a heavy lift for high-volume sellers, like franchise restaurants with rotating seasonal menus. Restaurants, fast food locations, cafés, and other delivery food sellers can use Photoroom to integrate efficient AI-driven batch processing and tools into their visual workflows. Photoroom’s AI tools help visual production teams create more consistent, accurate, and compliant images, which can lead to higher sales. Print-on-demand platform Completeful saw sales double after integrating Photoroom’s API; see how much you can save with the ROI calculator.
Food delivery app image requirements by platform
Each food delivery app has unique requirements, from the placement of the food to the final file type. If your restaurant is listed on different apps, you’ll need to keep these differences in mind during production to avoid spending time re-editing your work.
Here are the image guidelines for four common delivery apps around the world: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Wolt, and Deliveroo.
App | Placement | Background | Aspect ratio | File type | Other tips |
DoorDash | Dish must be centered and at least 80% visible in the frame (landscape orientation) | Simple, non-distracting background. No creative, overly colorful, white, or transparent backgrounds |
| JPG, JPEG, or PNG |
|
Uber Eats | Dish must be framed in the center (not cut off) and leveled | No strict requirements, but simple backgrounds recommended |
| JPG, PNG, or GIF |
|
Wolt | Dish must be centered in the frame (landscape orientation) | No strict requirements, but natural, simple backgrounds recommended |
| JPEG or PNG |
|
Deliveroo | Dish must be placed in the center (landscape orientation) | White background whenever possible; neutral backgrounds acceptable |
| JPEG only. All files need to be labelled with correct dish names |
|
DoorDash
DoorDash requires that all photo images include at least 80% of the dish centered in a horizontal format with no people, added text, or graphic overlays. Unlike other food delivery apps, you can’t use “overly colorful” and creative, white, or transparent backgrounds for your images, so stick to a non-distracting, neutral setting rather than elaborately staged lifestyle photography. Photoroom can easily remove and replace backgrounds, so you can avoid unnecessary reshoots just to meet this requirement.
Uber Eats
Although Uber Eats gives you a little more flexibility with the aspect ratio (between 5:4 and 6:4), double-check that your dishes aren’t cut off by the frame. Neither Uber Eats nor Wolt have strict background requirements, but for the best chance of approval, use a simple background and avoid harsh shadows and added text. Uber Eats also checks images for sanitary conditions, so make sure that your setting is clean and hygienic (e.g., doesn’t include dirty silverware, packaging, or surfaces nearby).
Wolt
Wolt is owned by DoorDash, but has different image requirements from its parent company. Its image size requirements are smaller—at least 1,000 x 563 pixels—and the app won’t accept entirely AI generated images, though it encourages AI-powered edits through its partnership with Photoroom. All images must accurately match what your customers will receive, so start with a picture of your real menu offering to properly show off portion sizes and presentation.
Like most food delivery apps, Wolt asks for a centered image that’s clearly visible (bright lighting without excess contrast or harsh shadows), a clean background, with no people, text overlays, or added graphics.
Deliveroo
In addition to standard food delivery app requirements, Deliveroo doesn’t allow the inclusion of styled raw ingredients in the shot. As a general rule for this app, avoid making edits that could misrepresent your food, and opt instead for simple, uncluttered visuals. Deliveroo also needs files labeled with the correct dish names before uploading to be accepted.
Common reasons food delivery photos get rejected
Food delivery apps will reject menu photos that don’t meet their exact standards. By understanding what each app needs and creating a unique workflow in Photoroom that captures each set of requirements, you can build a system that gets your images right the first time.
Incorporate quality checks to avoid the following missteps in your image production workflow:
The photo is the wrong size or resolution: Resize your photo for each app’s resolution and aspect ratio using Photoroom’s AI Image Resizer, or adjust positioning in bulk to ensure the entire meal is visible when the image is cropped.
The photo is blurry or has poor lighting: Be sure your photo is in focus and uses natural lighting without distracting shadows. If the meal looks blurry, you can sharpen it using Photoroom’s AI Image Enhancer.
The background doesn’t follow guidelines: Background requirements vary widely across platforms. Start with a clean, simple background, then remove backgrounds in bulk and replace them with app-compliant ones as needed. You can use Batch edit on up to 250 images at a time with Photoroom, so you can add visuals to your menu faster with less manual effort.
The photo includes prohibited items: Most platforms don’t allow people, text, and graphic overlays to appear in the shot. Tread carefully with hands and raw ingredients, as only some platforms permit them. If there are too many distracting elements in the final shot, remove them with Photoroom’s Remove Objects tool.
The photo doesn’t accurately represent your food: The food pictured should be available on your menu and show an accurate portion size and presentation. Keep your edits focused on enhancing the presentation and visual clarity rather than trying to make your food look more appetizing. If your photo turns out less exact than you hoped, Photoroom’s AI Product Fixer can touch up the details without using additional AI credits.
How to produce compliant delivery app photos at scale with Photoroom: 4 steps
Photoroom’s visual product photography pipeline helps you maintain menu authenticity while perfecting compliant food delivery app images at scale. These four steps will help you set up a fully compliant, AI-powered food photography workflow and reclaim your operational resources.
1. Start with the basic image requirements
Start strong by taking high-resolution images in clean settings. But you don’t have to set up shots that perfectly align with each app’s requirements. Instead, once you have a basic image that meets most delivery app requirements—your menu item centered in a landscape shot in clear lighting (no oversaturation or harsh shadows) with no people and overlaid text or graphics—you can use Photoroom to modify batches of menu item visuals to fit each app’s requirements. We’ll touch on how in later steps.
One thing to keep in mind when you shoot: Leave generous margins around the dish. A landscape shot works as a general starting point, but platforms crop to different ratios (DoorDash uses a wide 16:9, while Uber Eats recommends a squarer 5:4, for example). Adapting a wide shot to a squarer format crops in from the left and right edges, so keeping your item centered with breathing room on all sides ensures nothing important gets cut.
2. Auto-resize for each platform’s specs
Off image sizes and resolutions are some of the most common reasons for platform rejection. Apply the correct aspect ratio and pixel resolution across your menu photos using Photoroom’s Batch editing interface to meet each platform’s guidelines.
3. Batch-edit your menu photos
On Photoroom, you can apply specific effects across your entire catalog to get your listings uploaded four times faster while maintaining brand authenticity. You can recenter your dish when cropping the image cuts off part of the food, fix too-bright highlights, and apply your edits across up to 250 images.
4. Integrate the Image Editing API into your workflows
For high-volume and complex image production workflows, use Photoroom’s Image Editing API. The API helps you create highly detailed image presets that integrate directly into your menu catalog and workflows to simplify compliance without increasing your operational overhead.
For instance, Wolt integrated Photoroom's API to improve brand adherence across its platform. With Photoroom’s help, Wolt auto-processed tens of thousands of images for 140,000+ sellers, attaining excellent visual consistency across the platform and raising customer trust.
Set up compliant image production workflows on Photoroom
Even though every food delivery app has unique image requirements, meeting them isn’t a matter of perfecting your images — it’s a production problem. You can efficiently meet all your platforms’ compliance needs by setting up your production workflows in Photoroom.
Our AI visual production workflow means you can beautify your menu images and tailor for each food delivery app’s requirements at scale without adding extra costs. In fact, restaurants that used Photoroom to prepare their menu photos cut editing costs by 93%, while adding 77% to the average basket value.
You can edit up to 250 menu photos at once using Photoroom’s Batch edit mode (or thousands with an Enterprise plan), so you only have to shoot each image once, no matter how many apps you sell on. Then, use our multichannel optimization to resize and reformat the images for each platform for total consistency no matter where customers find you.
