Your menu photo was rejected. How do you find out why?

A rejected photo is a solvable problem, but only if you can find out which rule it broke. That turns out to be the part the platforms differ on most, and it is worth knowing before you start guessing.

Only one of them does, and the gap between the three is much larger than the gap between their actual rules.

DoorDash publishes eleven rejection reasons and sends you the one that applies, so you know whether to reshoot, recrop or relight. That is the whole difference between a ten minute fix and an afternoon of guessing.

Uber Eats has a heading for exactly this question. The answer under it is one sentence:

The guidelines above run to roughly a dozen separate rules. You are told that one of them was broken, not which.

Grubhub does not answer it at all. Its help center describes an automated system that marks each image Approved, In review or Rejected, and publishes no reason codes to go with those statuses:

Start here, because the overlap is large and these are the reasons that account for most rejections.

Size and shape are worth treating separately from the rest, because they are the only rejection reason you can eliminate entirely at the moment you take the photo rather than at the moment you export it. Frame the dish with room around it and one original survives every crop.

Three, and the first will catch a photograph most people consider obviously fine.

Take the hands rule literally. A photograph of a hand holding a burger is acceptable on Uber Eats, acceptable on DoorDash only if the hand is soft and off to the side, and prohibited outright on Grubhub, whose developer portal names "body parts, hands holding food, people eating" among the things an image cannot contain. One image, three verdicts.

Grubhub's copyright check is the one nobody expects. It states that images must not return matching URLs from a reverse Google image search. That rejects a stock photo, but it also rejects a photograph of your own that already appears on your own website, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a restaurant to have done.

A rejection on one platform tells you very little about the other two. The rules genuinely differ, and only one platform will tell you which rule you hit, so debugging by resubmitting the same file everywhere wastes days.

The approach that costs least: shoot with margin around the dish, keep hands and text out of frame entirely, use a photograph that has never been published anywhere else, and export a separate file per platform. That single set of choices satisfies the strictest version of every rule above, which means you never have to work out which platform you are arguing with.

If a photo has already been rejected, open the platform's own page for the details rather than guessing from another platform's rules.