Your menu photo is twenty-three megapixels
We measured the photographs behind one live menu: 134 distinct images, averaging 1.7 MB, the largest 4000 by 5739 pixels. One of them gets painted into an icon 34 pixels across. What that costs a guest on a phone outside.
Menu photographs are the one part of a digital menu that operators are encouraged to care about and never asked to measure. Somebody takes good pictures, somebody uploads them, the menu looks better. Nobody weighs them.
We weighed them. One live venue, and these are read off the files rather than estimated: 139 dishes carry a photograph, 134 of them distinct. The average is 1.7 MB. The largest is just over 4 MB, at 4000 by 5739 pixels — about twenty-three megapixels, which is a photograph you could print at poster size.
Where those pixels go
They go down somebody’s mobile connection while they stand in a queue. And a good number of them are not even being looked at properly: one of our own screens paints a dish photograph as the background of an icon 34 pixels across. Every one of those twenty-three million pixels is downloaded and then thrown away by the browser to make a thumbnail the size of a fingernail.
Opening our register pulled five of them at once.
How it happens, which is the useful part
Not through carelessness. Our uploader shrinks a photograph in the browser before it is ever sent, which is the right place to do it — it saves the guest’s data and the operator’s upload. That has worked for every photo taken through the app.
The large ones came in by a different door. When a venue moved across from a previous provider, its existing photographs were copied over wholesale so the menu did not arrive empty. Copied means copied: at whatever size the old system had them. The path with the safeguard on it was not the path most of these images took.
That is a shape worth recognising, because it is not specific to photographs. The careful route and the bulk route are rarely the same route, and the safeguards tend to be written on the careful one.
What we are not claiming
We have not fixed this. Re-encoding images that are already live, or turning on paid image resizing, or changing which size a screen asks for, are three different decisions with three different costs, and they are the venue’s to make rather than ours to make quietly overnight. We are reporting a measurement.
What to do about your own
Open your own QR menu on mobile data, away from your wifi, and watch how the pictures arrive. If they fade in one by one down the page, they are too big. A dish photograph on a phone rarely needs to be more than about 1200 pixels wide, which is a fraction of what a modern phone camera produces by default. And if you have ever migrated a menu from another system, assume nothing was resized on the way in until you have checked one.