About PrintSizeChecker

A free tool built by a photographer who got tired of wasted print orders — and decided to fix the problem properly.

The Problem That Started All of This

The frustration that led to PrintSizeChecker is embarrassingly simple: printers and monitors don't speak the same language, and nobody tells you that until after you've wasted $60 on a canvas print that looks like it was run through a blender.

A photo can look absolutely stunning on a 27-inch retina display. Crisp, detailed, perfect. Then you order a 16×20 inch print, it arrives, and it's soft. Blurry around the edges. The colours are different. The detail you spent an hour editing is just... gone.

This happens because screens display images at 72–96 pixels per inch, which makes even relatively low-resolution images look sharp. Printers work at 300 dots per inch, which requires significantly more raw pixel data to produce the same level of sharpness. The screen was lying to you — and there was no easy way to know that before sending the file.

I tried every online tool I could find. Most just converted pixels to inches using a fixed 300 DPI assumption and gave you a number. They didn't factor in that 200 DPI looks perfectly fine for a large canvas viewed from across the room. They didn't show you the visual difference between quality levels. They didn't warn you when something was borderline. They definitely didn't help you prepare the file for a specific print lab's requirements.

So I built something that did all of that — and kept it free, because the problem it solves shouldn't cost money to solve.

How the Tool Works

PrintSizeChecker takes your image, reads its pixel dimensions, and calculates exactly how large it can be printed at different quality levels. It doesn't guess, and it doesn't use fixed rules. It uses your actual file and your target print size to give you a specific quality rating.

The Story Behind the Site

The Writing Behind the Guides

Every article on PrintSizeChecker is written by me — Marcus Webb — based on real experience with photography, printing, and the workflows that connect the two. I don't publish articles on topics I don't genuinely understand, and every guide is grounded in real photography and printing experience.

The guides cover topics I've dealt with personally: why monitors and printers show different colours, how to know if an iPhone photo will make a good print, what the actual difference between lustre and glossy paper is, which photo labs produce consistently good results, and how AI upscaling tools can recover a low-resolution file for large format printing.

If something changes — a tool gets updated, a lab changes its pricing, a new iPhone raises the bar for print quality — I update the article. These aren't evergreen pieces written once and forgotten. They're living guides.

What Makes PrintSizeChecker Different

• Built by a photographer, not a tech company. The decisions about what this tool does and doesn't do are made by someone who uses it professionally, not by a product team optimising for engagement metrics.
• No account required. You don't need to sign up, log in, or give an email address to use any part of this site. The tool works the moment you land on the page.
• No image uploads. Every calculation happens in your browser and your photos never leave your device. We record only limited anonymous usage statistics — never your images themselves. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail.
• No paywalls. Every tool, every guide, every calculator on this site is free. No premium tier, no subscription, no "pro version."
• Honest quality ratings. The tool doesn't tell you your image is fine when it isn't. If a photo won't print well at a given size, it says so clearly — before you waste money finding out the hard way.

Photography Experience & Background

I've been shooting seriously since my early twenties — starting with film, moving to digital, and spending the last several years working across landscape photography, portrait work, and commercial projects. Print has always been central to how I think about photography. I don't consider a photo finished until I've seen it on paper.

That orientation toward the physical print is what shapes every decision about this site. The tool exists to make the path from digital file to physical print as predictable as possible. The guides exist to give photographers the knowledge they need to make better decisions before they order.

If you have a question that isn't answered here or in the guides, the Contact page is real and I read every message.