Why was your Grubhub photo rejected?

Grubhub screens menu photos automatically and marks each one Approved, In review or Rejected. Its published criteria are food only, no adult or violent content, no body parts, no stock photography, and nothing that matches a reverse Google image search. Grubhub publishes no review time, no reason codes and no appeal process.

Su Lee · Founder, MenuPhotoLab

Six years photographing Atlanta restaurants, and two running SocialLee, uploading their menus to DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub.

Sources last read 2026-09-17 · 9 sources

Why was my Grubhub photo rejected?

Grubhub screens menu images with software, not a review team. Its own words are "our automated system" and "system criteria", and every image you upload lands in one of three states that Grubhub publishes plainly: Approved, the image passed system criteria; In review, the image is currently in the system processing; and Rejected, the image did not pass system criteria.

What Grubhub does not do is tell you which criterion you failed. There is no reason code and no explanation next to the status. That is the single biggest practical difference between a Grubhub rejection and a DoorDash or Uber Eats one, and it is why this page is a checklist rather than a lookup.

Grubhub publishes its criteria in two different places. The merchant help centre carries four labelled criteria. The developer portal carries a section actually headed "Image Rejection". The two lists do not match, and neither is complete on its own, so the list below merges them and marks where each rule comes from.

Grubhub's rule	Where Grubhub publishes it	What it means in practice
All images except for the logo should be photos of food. Photos of coupons, weekly specials or restaurant interior/exterior are not accepted	Merchant help centre	Food only. A dining room shot, a storefront, or a promotional graphic fails however well made it is. The logo is the single carve-out
Images cannot contain images flagged for adult content, violence or medical (i.e. gore/blood)	Merchant help centre	An automated safe-search pass. Grubhub does not publish what trips it or how to appeal when it misfires
Images must not return matching URLs from reverse Google image search	Merchant help centre	Grubhub is the only one of the three platforms that says how it checks copyright. A supplier photo or a stock image will match. So can a photo already published somewhere else online
Body parts -- hands holding food, people eating, etc	Developer portal, under the heading Image Rejection	Read this one twice if you also sell on Uber Eats. Uber's rule is "Depict people (except for hands)", so hands are explicitly allowed there and explicitly listed here. The same photo can pass one and fail the other
Copyrighted images or stock photography with the exception of corporate photos for the corresponding merchant chain	Developer portal, under the heading Image Rejection	If you are a franchise, brand photography supplied by your chain is allowed. Third party stock is not
Images shouldn't have text or words on them, including the name of the dish, coupons, or special deal information. Logos cannot have the restaurant phone number included	Deleted from the live site. Archived 2021	The clearest text rule Grubhub ever wrote, and it is no longer anywhere on grubhub.com. Still worth following: the developer portal's best practice line asks for photography with limited text

Merchant criteria read on get.grubhub.com, 2026-09-17. Developer portal read in a rendered browser on 2026-09-17, because the page does not serve its content to crawlers. The text rule is quoted from a 2021 Internet Archive capture of a Grubhub URL that now returns 404. Wording in the first column is Grubhub's.

The page headed Image Rejection has two bullets, and one of them is broken

This is worth stating plainly because it explains why the rules feel incomplete: they are. Grubhub's developer portal has a section literally headed Image Rejection, and reading its rendered markup on 2026-09-17 the list contains exactly two items. The second reads "Exceptions: Text in the merchant name for the logo or any branding on items. Copyrighted images or stock photography with the exception of corporate photos for the corresponding merchant chain." That is plainly two separate rules, one about text and one about stock photography, fused into a single bullet with its lead-in missing. So the only Grubhub page with the word Rejection in its heading ships a two item list, half of it corrupted. If you have been searching for Grubhub's rejection reasons and concluded you must be looking in the wrong place, you were not.

Which Grubhub photo spec actually applies to me?

Grubhub has published three different shapes for a menu item photo, and two of them are live right now on Grubhub-owned pages that contradict each other on aspect ratio, minimum size and file format at the same time.

	Merchant help centre	Developer portal	Deprecated API docs
Aspect ratio	1:1 square	4:3	3:2 recommended
Minimum size	200 x 200	1600 x 1200	200 x 200
Recommended size	None stated	None stated	3000 x 2000
Format	Must be saved as a .png file	.png, .jpeg or .jpg	Not stated
File size cap	None published	None published	No larger than 5 MB
Readable by answer engines	Yes	No, JavaScript only	Yes

All three are Grubhub's own. Merchant and developer pages read 2026-09-17; the third is Grubhub's deprecated developer documentation, which carries its own notice pointing at the current portal. Grubhub does not reconcile them anywhere.

The likeliest explanation, which Grubhub does not state, is that the two live documents govern two different ways a photo reaches Grubhub. The help centre describes uploading in the merchant portal by hand. The developer portal describes images pushed through the API by a point of sale or menu integrator. If that is right, the spec that applies to you is decided by how your menu gets to Grubhub rather than by which page you happened to find first.

Until Grubhub says so, the durable answer is to stop exporting to a target shape at all. Shoot and keep a high resolution original with the dish inside the middle 75 percent of the frame in both directions. From one such file you can produce a square for the portal, a 4:3 for an integrator, DoorDash's 16:9 and Uber Eats' narrower band without the dish ever losing its edges. That is the same arithmetic as the cross-platform guide, and Grubhub is the platform that makes the case for it.

Both specifications are Grubhub's own, read 2026-08-27. A centred square cut from 4:3 keeps 75 percent of the width.

What Grubhub does not publish

This section exists because the absence is the answer. Four things a rejected merchant needs are simply not on any Grubhub page we could reach on 2026-09-17, and knowing they are missing saves you looking.

No review time. Grubhub publishes no turnaround for image moderation. Uber Eats publishes up to 3 business days. DoorDash publishes nothing either, so Grubhub is not unusual here, but it does mean you cannot tell a slow queue from a silent failure.
No reason codes. The status is Approved, In review or Rejected. Which criterion failed is not shown.
No appeal process. Nothing on the live merchant pages describes contesting a rejection. This is not the same as saying no appeal exists: the detailed photo article is behind a merchant login, and what sits inside the portal may differ from what sits outside it.
No file size limit for portal uploads. The only megabyte figure Grubhub has ever published, 5 MB, is in the deprecated API documentation. Any file size cap you have read for the Grubhub merchant portal is someone's guess.
The detailed article is gated. Grubhub's live wording: "To learn how to add photos from your mobile or desktop account, please sign in to your Grubhub for Restaurants account to access this help center article." Sign in before you go looking for it.

Is the photo rejected, or is your POS overwriting it?

Check this before anything else on this page, because if it applies to you then none of the rest does. A photo that disappears from your Grubhub menu has not necessarily been rejected. It may have been overwritten.

On a Toast integration, Grubhub takes its images from Toast every night

Grubhub documents this in its own words: "When restaurants go live on the integration, their existing menu on Grubhub will be overwritten with their menu and images from Toast", and "Menus are refreshed from Toast on a nightly basis, so updates made to Toast during the day will be reflected the following day in Grubhub." Grubhub's instruction is blunt: "Restaurants should make ALL menu changes on Toast, NOT on the Grubhub portal." So if you are on that integration and you upload a photo in the Grubhub portal, it can look accepted, go live, and be gone the next morning, with no rejection anywhere, because the nightly sync replaced your menu with Toast's. Upload it in Toast instead. The same logic applies to any other integration that owns your menu.

What can I actually do about a rejected Grubhub photo?

In this order, because the cheap checks come first and the only human route comes last.

Confirm the upload path. If an integrator owns your menu, fix the photo there, not in the Grubhub portal.
Re-check the image against the merged rule list above, particularly the three that catch good photography: hands in frame, any text on the image, and a photo that exists elsewhere online and will match a reverse image search.
Re-export to the spec for your path, square .png for the portal, 4:3 for an integrator, comfortably above the minimum either way.
Re-upload and watch the status, which is the only feedback Grubhub gives. There is no published queue time, so leave it a day before concluding anything.
Contact Restaurant Care if you believe the rejection is wrong. The only remedy sentence Grubhub has ever published is on the page it deleted: "If you believe a photo was rejected in error, contact Restaurant Care at 877-799-0790". That phone number is still live on Grubhub's review removal page today, alongside restaurants@grubhub.com.

The Grubhub photo numbers you have read elsewhere that are not Grubhub's

Searching for this topic returns a large number of pages that agree with each other in confident detail and cite nothing. We checked the three claims that recur most, against Grubhub's own properties, on 2026-09-17.

The claim	What we found
Grubhub requires 1400 x 1400	Not a Grubhub spec. The string 1400 appears on Grubhub's merchant page only inside an image filename on the page itself. No Grubhub property publishes 1400 x 1400 as a requirement
Grubhub reviews photos in one to three business days	Grubhub publishes no review time anywhere. The figure appears on no Grubhub property we could reach
Email photos@grubhub.com to appeal	We could not find that address on any Grubhub property. The contact Grubhub actually published, in the 2021 capture, is restaurants@grubhub.com
Grubhub wants 16:9 at 1400 x 800	This one has an honest origin: it is what the integrator Checkmate publishes to its own merchants. It is a fourth aspect ratio, it matches none of Grubhub's three, and it is guidance from an integrator rather than from Grubhub

Checked against Grubhub-owned pages on 2026-09-17. Where we say we could not find something, that means exactly that: Grubhub keeps material behind a merchant login, and undocumented is not the same as nonexistent.

Frequently asked questions

Why was my Grubhub menu photo rejected?

Grubhub's published criteria are that the image must be food, not a coupon, special or interior shot; must not be flagged for adult content, violence or gore; must not match a reverse Google image search; must not show body parts such as hands holding food; and must not be stock or copyrighted photography, unless it is corporate photography for your own chain. Grubhub does not tell you which one you failed.

How long does Grubhub take to review a photo?

Grubhub publishes no review time. The image carries a status of Approved, In review or Rejected, and that status is the only feedback. Uber Eats publishes up to 3 business days, and DoorDash publishes nothing, so Grubhub sits with DoorDash here. The one to three business days figure repeated on many sites does not appear on any Grubhub page.

Can I appeal a Grubhub photo rejection?

Grubhub does not publish an appeal process on its live merchant pages. The only remedy it ever published, on a page since deleted, was to contact Restaurant Care at 877-799-0790 if you believe a photo was rejected in error. Grubhub now gates that number behind a merchant login. Since the detailed photo article is gated too, there may be more inside the portal than outside it.

What size should a Grubhub photo be?

It depends which Grubhub document applies to you, because they disagree. The merchant help centre says 1:1 square, at least 200 x 200, saved as .png. The developer portal says 4:3, at least 1600 x 1200, as .png, .jpeg or .jpg. The likeliest reading is that the first covers manual portal uploads and the second covers images pushed through the API by an integrator.

Can I use the same photo on Grubhub and Uber Eats?

Not always, and hands are the reason people get caught. Uber Eats prohibits photos that depict people but explicitly allows hands. Grubhub's developer portal lists body parts, including hands holding food, under Image Rejection. A photo of a dish being served that passes Uber Eats can fail Grubhub on that rule alone, before the different shapes are even considered.

My Grubhub photo disappeared but I never got a rejection. Why?

Check whether an integration owns your menu. Grubhub documents that restaurants on the Toast integration have their Grubhub menu and images overwritten from Toast, refreshed nightly, and instructs those restaurants to make all menu changes in Toast rather than the Grubhub portal. In that situation a photo uploaded to Grubhub can be replaced overnight without any rejection taking place.

Not sure whether a photo you already have will pass?

Run it through the free Photo Rejection Checker. It tests the size, shape, format and file size of any photo against each platform's published specs, and lists the content rules alongside. No signup.

Check a photo

Keep reading

Su Lee

Founder, MenuPhotoLab · Atlanta, Georgia

I have photographed Atlanta restaurants for six years as a food creator, and for the last two my sister and I have run SocialLee, shooting and uploading menus for independent restaurants around metro Atlanta. I wrote this page the way I wish the platforms had written theirs: every number read off their own documentation, with the date I read it, and where they contradict themselves I say so.

Sources

Platform requirements change. This page carries the date each source was last checked.

Not affiliated with Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Toast.