Uploading café photos

Photos do most of the heavy lifting on your café profile. Good ones lift discovery click-through by 30 to 50 percent in our internal benchmarks. Here’s how to do it well.

Where to upload

Dashboard → Profile → Photos. Drag-and-drop or click to browse. You can have:

• One hero image (used in discovery and at the top of your profile)
• Up to nine additional images (used in the photo gallery)

Technical specs

• Format: JPG or PNG, or WebP if you have it.
• Hero image: 1600x900 minimum, 16:9 ratio. We crop to fit if needed.
• Gallery images: any size, we resize and serve appropriately.
• Maximum file size: 10MB per image. We compress further on upload.

We process to multiple sizes server-side so you don’t need to make different versions.

What makes a great hero photo

The hero is what shows up in someone’s discovery feed. It’s the one image that decides whether they click through. The best hero photos:

• Show the café itself, not the coffee. A wide shot of your space says more than a close-up of a flat white.
• Include people, but not in an awkward staged way. A regular at a window seat, a barista at the machine, a queue at the counter.
• Are taken in natural light. Direct sun is fine; harsh fluorescent is hard to make work.
• Show the time of day you most want customers (morning light for a daytime café, warm evening light for a wine-and-coffee venue).

What to avoid

• Stock photography. Customers spot it instantly, and it kills trust.
• Heavy filters or aggressive saturation. Looks dated within a year.
• Crowded “menu board” shots. They don’t add information that the menu page doesn’t already cover.
• Selfies of the owner, except in the gallery (your owner shot is welcome there, just not as the hero).

When to refresh

Refresh the hero seasonally if your café’s mood shifts (lots of summer terraces vs. winter window seats), and immediately after any visible change to the space (new fitout, new equipment, repaint).

See also

• Registering your café
• Reading your analytics dashboard