What do you get from DoorDash's free photoshoot?

DoorDash books and pays a professional photographer to come to your restaurant. Everything below is from DoorDash's own merchant help pages, read 2026-09-16.

That is a real offer and it is worth taking. A photographer booked privately charges about $25 to $40 a dish for an unstyled menu shoot at the rates photographers publish, so a 20 item shoot is roughly a $500 to $800 job that DoorDash is covering. If you sell on DoorDash and nowhere else, take the shoot and stop reading here.

Not on another delivery app, according to DoorDash. You can use the photos on DoorDash, your own website, social media and promotional materials, but DoorDash's pages say they may not be used on other third-party delivery platforms such as Uber Eats or Grubhub. How firmly each page says it varies.

That is the question the whole shoot turns on, and DoorDash words the answer three different ways on two of its own properties. All three were read on 2026-09-16.

This is not an isolated slip either. DoorDash publishes two different file size caps on a single specification page, 2 MB in the table and 16 MB in the run-down below it. Reading their pages carefully is a normal part of selling on the platform.

For a short menu, yes. For most, no, and the gap is bigger than owners expect because a menu item is not the same thing as a dish.

DoorDash treats every size variant as its own menu item, and every menu item needs its own photo. A wings restaurant selling 6, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 75 and 100 piece counts has nine menu items in that one category, and one photo cannot cover them. Reusing a single shot across the piece counts is one of DoorDash's published rejection reasons.

So count menu items rather than recipes before deciding whether 20 covers you. A menu that reads as 25 dishes can easily be 60 items once the sizes, combos and add-on variants are counted the way the platform counts them.

Take the DoorDash shoot for what it covers, and understand that it is a DoorDash asset. Then decide how the other platforms get filled.

The shapes do not match either, which matters even where the usage rule does not. DoorDash wants 16:9. Uber Eats wants a band between 5:4 and 6:4, so a 16:9 file sits outside it. Grubhub publishes two specs that disagree with each other. A file cropped for one platform is rarely the right file for the next one, and that is true regardless of who took the photo.

If you shoot the menu yourself or hire someone directly, the photos are yours outright and the only remaining problem is the crop. Keep the dish inside the middle 75 percent of the frame and one original survives all three platforms. The arithmetic is on the cross-platform guide.

Uber Eats does. It offers qualifying restaurants a complimentary shoot during onboarding, covering individual items plus one profile image, with the files emailed to you and to your Uber Eats representative. On that page Uber writes: "Feel free to use the photos in your own marketing, too."

Do not read that as permission to put them on DoorDash. "Your own marketing" is a phrase about your website, your social accounts and your printed menu. Uber's page says nothing either way about competing marketplaces, and silence is not permission. The binding terms are in the agreement you signed. The full comparison is on the Uber Eats guide.

Grubhub does too, but not on every plan. Grubhub says partners "can schedule a free photoshoot so you can get professional photos of your cuisine to feature in your digital presence." Its plan comparison lists the free professional menu photoshoot as included in the Plus and All-access plans and not in Basic. The booking page, run for Grubhub by SmartShoot, offers packages of 11 to 15, 16 to 20 and 21 to 30 menu items, and says a photographer comes for a one-hour shoot.

Where the photos go is Grubhub's listing: the booking page says they are "sent to Grubhub to be published on your listing." I found no Grubhub page that restricts using them elsewhere, and none that grants you the right to. Grubhub's merchant terms say you own the photos you supply and license them to Grubhub, but they do not say whether photos from a shoot Grubhub arranged count as yours. Ask before you put them on another app.