Menu photos that survive UK takeaway lighting

The Just Eat menu photo playbook, in one preset

Just Eat's photo policy is the operational layer of every menu listing across the Just Eat Takeaway estate, which spans Just Eat in the UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand, Lieferando in Germany / Austria, Thuisbezorgd in the Netherlands, Pyszne in Poland, the Just Eat-branded surfaces in Italy / Spain / France / Portugal / Bulgaria / Israel, and the legacy Takeaway.com mainland-Europe brands. The customer-app card on every brand renders the menu item as a 1:1 square thumbnail, identical to DoorDash / Grubhub's display surface and unlike Uber Eats / Deliveroo's 4:3 cards. The technical recommendation is 1600×1600 px (with 2000×2000 the upload target so the CDN can downscale crisply across phone and desktop on every Just Eat Takeaway-owned consumer brand). The minimum floor is 1024×1024; below that menu items get hidden from photo-led ordering surfaces (the carousel, the Popular rail, the recommended-with feature). JPEG is preferred (PNG accepted); the per-image cap is 8 MB; the colour space is sRGB. The restaurant cover banner is a separate 16:9 slot at 1920×1080 — distinct from menu items.

The rules that move the Just Eat for Restaurants merchant-portal image-quality classifier are mostly about UK takeaway lighting, single-dish framing, and competitor-app branding cleanup. UK takeaway overhead fluorescent lighting throws strong yellow / orange / green casts that make food look unappetising — the universal recurring fix for fish-and-chips, kebab shops, curry houses, Chinese takeaways, and pizza shops. The classifier penalises images with strong colour casts, dim service-line lighting between lunch and dinner, multiple unrelated dishes in one frame on a non-combo item, photos that don't depict the actual menu item (a generic burger photo on a regional sandwich), competitor branding (Deliveroo / Uber Eats / Postmates packaging visible in service-line shots — multi-app-tied takeaways are a default UK reality and merchants forget to clean the frame), stock photos used without licence (Just Eat cross-references known food-stock libraries), and excessive HDR / oversaturated processing. Kebab and curry house dishes (Just Eat's two largest UK cuisine categories) typically benefit from a slight overhead angle that frames the rice and sides alongside the protein. The preset solves the recurring fix list — the fluorescent cast, the competitor packaging, the dim service-line exposure, the 9:16-to-1:1 crop — in a single pass.

Why menu photos are worth more than the menu copy on Just Eat

Just Eat's photo-led ordering surfaces — the carousel, the Popular rail, the recommended-with feature — favour menu items with photos over items without. UK / EU takeaway customers browse food primarily by image, and items without photos drop to the bottom of the menu page where most of the order traffic never reaches. Merchants who add photos to every item see meaningful order-rate lifts, and merchants who upgrade existing photos from dim service-line shots to corrected-cast 1:1 squares at 1600×1600 see a second lift on top — because the corrected images survive the merchant-portal classifier and stay eligible for the photo-led surfaces. Multi-app-tied takeaways see the strongest impact from clearing competitor-app packaging from the frame, because Just Eat's reviewers explicitly flag visible Deliveroo / Uber Eats branding. Running every menu item through the preset before the next quarterly menu refresh is a cheaper order-rate lift than any other change a takeaway can ship without re-cooking the menu.