Which spec do you follow when a platform publishes two?

Every figure here comes from the platform's own merchant documentation, read on the date shown against each source. DoorDash wants 16:9, Uber Eats a band from 5:4 to 6:4, and Grubhub publishes two answers, which is where the rest of this page starts.

Most photo advice assumes each platform publishes one number. Read the documentation closely and that turns out not to be true. Three of the five platforms I upload to publish figures that disagree with figures published by the same company, sometimes on the same page.

This matters for a practical reason rather than a pedantic one. If you follow the wrong half of a contradiction, your photo is rejected and the rejection notice quotes the other half back at you.

This is the largest contradiction in delivery photo documentation, and neither Grubhub page acknowledges the other exists. They are not two levels of detail on one rule. They disagree on every field.

An image that satisfies the help center is 48 times smaller in area than the developer portal's minimum, and the wrong shape besides. Square is not 4:3.

Which one binds you appears to depend on how your menu reaches Grubhub, manual upload versus a partner feed. Grubhub does not say that anywhere, so treat it as my inference from who each page is written for, not as a rule you can hold them to.

Both, on one page, in two different sections. The part explaining why photos get rejected for size states a 2 MB maximum. The requirements run-down further down the same page lists item photos as under 16 MB.

A merchant reading top to bottom gets one answer. A merchant skipping to the spec table gets another, eight times larger.

There is no ambiguity about what to do, which makes this the easiest of the three: stay under 2 MB and you satisfy both readings at once. It matters mainly as a warning about the rest. If a platform can contradict itself inside one page, a number you read somewhere else six months ago deserves re-checking.

Yes, on two counts. Here are both articles, in Toast's own words.

A restaurant that follows the first recommendation exactly produces a file that misses the second one twice.

Export 1920 x 1080 and both articles are satisfied with room to spare: it is 16:9, which Toast lists, and its shortest side is already above the 1000 px figure.

One honest note on wording, because it changes how hard this conflict bites. Both Toast figures are phrased as recommendations rather than requirements, so neither is a rule you can be rejected against in the way DoorDash's 16:9 is. The shape half is the firmer of the two, because "support" is the verb Toast uses for the three accepted ratios.

Three separate reasons, and only one of them is the obvious one.

Keep the dish inside the middle 75 percent of the frame, in both directions.

That number is not a rule of thumb, it is what the published requirements work out to. Take a 4:3 photo. The 16:9 crop keeps the full width and removes the top and bottom. The 1:1 crop keeps the full height and removes the sides, and you cannot avoid that one: DoorDash renders every item photo as a centered square thumbnail, and Grubhub's help center asks for a square outright. The 5:4 crop sits between them. The area that survives all three is the center 75 percent of the width and 75 percent of the height. Anything outside that rectangle is cut by at least one platform.

The 75 percent figure is specific to a 4:3 photo. Shoot a different shape and the safe zone moves, because the crop that hurts you changes.

Two things follow. Shoot 4:3 if you sell on all three platforms, because it is the only shape where no single crop takes a large bite. And check what your camera is set to before a shoot: 4:3 is the default for stills on most phones, but video mode, panorama, and many pro modes shoot 16:9, which is the worst shape here despite being the one DoorDash asks for.

Shoot at the largest size any platform accepts and scale down, then export separately per platform. Not one file renamed three times.

The usual advice is to export one file per platform. These contradictions mean that is not enough on its own, because for some platforms there is no single agreed target to export to.

What survives everything is framing the shot with room around the dish. Every conflict above is about size and shape, and both are decided when the photo is taken rather than when it is exported. A dish photographed tight to the edges cannot be recropped to 4:3 and 1:1 and 16:9 from the same original. A dish with margin can.

The practical rule I use on my own uploads: shoot wide, export to the strictest figure in each contradiction, and keep the original. Strictest means 1600 x 1200 for Grubhub, under 2 MB for DoorDash, and 1920 x 1080 for Toast. Every one of those also clears the looser figure it conflicts with.