Can you use the same photo on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub?

Every figure here comes from the platform's own merchant documentation, read on the date shown against each source. Where a platform's own page contradicts itself, I have said so rather than picked the number I liked.

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 centred square thumbnail, and Grubhub's help centre 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. A 16:9 original loses 44 percent of its width the moment anything squares it, including DoorDash's own thumbnail.

Shoot at the largest size any platform accepts and scale down. Uber Eats takes up to 10,000 pixels on a side, DoorDash asks for at least 1400 x 800, and Grubhub's help centre floor of 200 x 200 is far below what looks acceptable on a modern phone screen, while its developer documentation asks for 1600 x 1200. A large original gives you room to crop three ways.

Then export separately per platform. Not one file renamed three times.

DoorDash rejects photos where the item is less than 80 percent visible, and publishes eleven rejection categories including wrong size or resolution, incorrect framing, too zoomed in or out, poor lighting, problematic background, overlays or watermarks, people in frame, out of focus, copyright issues, duplicates, and items that do not represent what the customer receives.

Uber Eats requires the item centered, with nothing at the corners or running off frame, and no more than one item per photo.

Grubhub requires food photos only, so no coupons, no weekly specials, no interior or exterior shots, and it checks copyright by looking for matching results in a reverse image search.

Put those together and the constraint is not really about export settings. It is about how the photo was framed when it was taken.

DoorDash offers qualifying merchants a photoshoot, and it is worth taking. You get up to 20 photos of your menu items plus a header shot of your store, and the only cost to your business is the food itself. Merchants on the Premier plan also get a $200 credit toward food or styling.

There is one condition worth reading before you plan around it, and DoorDash states it plainly on their own page.

This is the part that catches people out. A restaurant takes the free shoot, sees a full DoorDash menu, and assumes the photo problem is handled. Months later the Uber Eats listing is still half blank, and the photos that would fix it are the one set they are not allowed to use.

If you are only on DoorDash, take the shoot and stop reading. If you sell anywhere else, you need a set of photos you own outright, which in practice means photos you took yourself.