What are Toast's menu photo requirements?

It depends which Toast page you read, and there are three of them. I read all three on 2026-09-21. They disagree on size and on file format.

If your online ordering menu uses an Online Ordering Pro template, the 1000 pixel rule governs what your guests actually see. It is the page describing the surface a customer browses, and Toast updated it on 2026-09-16.

The 750 x 450 recommendation is not wrong, it is narrow and old. It comes from the articles about attaching an image to an item at all. That image then travels: Toast states it "will carry over to your Toast online ordering website".

Because one upload feeds every surface, satisfy the strictest rule. A file that clears 1000 pixels also clears 750 x 450. The reverse is not true, which is the entire problem with following Toast's own recommendation.

Export 1920 x 1080. It is 16:9, one of the three ratios Online Ordering Pro supports, and its longer side is nearly double the 1000 pixel minimum. If your template is a square layout, export 1200 x 1200 instead. The full set, if you want one file per layout:

Yes, and Toast says so in its own words. The Menu Manager article states that images "may be cropped or zoomed to fit certain POS displays because the POS applies its own aspect-ratio framing", and tells you to "center the key content of the image so it remains visible after cropping".

The Online Ordering Pro page describes the same behaviour from the other side: "All images will fill the container within the menu layout selected." Fill, not fit. A 16:9 file dropped into a square container loses its left and right edges.

This is why the 5:3 recommendation matters less than it looks. Whatever you upload is reframed at least once before a guest sees it, so what protects you is where the dish sits in the frame, not which exact ratio you exported.

The centred square is the whole rule. A 16:9 file dropped into a square container keeps only 56.25 percent of its width, so a dish that runs to the edges of your frame loses those edges on a square template. Keep the dish inside the middle square and all three containers show the same food.

This is also why shooting matters more than exporting. You can crop a wide photo down to a square. You cannot widen a square photo back out without inventing edges that were never there, which is the point where a photo stops being a record of the dish you actually serve.

Five steps in Toast Web, and the last one is the one people miss.

Not automatically, and you should not assume a Toast-sized photo will satisfy a delivery marketplace even if an integration moves it. Toast and the marketplaces publish different specs, and the marketplaces run a review queue that Toast does not.

If your menu reaches DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub through an integration, the receiving platform's rules are the ones that decide whether the image is accepted. A 1920 x 1080 file matches DoorDash's 16:9 item spec exactly, sits outside the 5:4 to 6:4 band Uber Eats recommends, and is not the 4:3 that Grubhub's developer documentation asks for.

Toast publishes no photo review or approval step, and none appears in the documented upload flow. That is a statement about Toast's documentation, not a guarantee about your account.

The reason is structural. Toast is a point of sale system with its own online ordering, not a delivery marketplace. Photos you add in Menu Manager appear on your own ordering site, your POS screens and your kiosks. No third party moderates them, which is the opposite of how DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub work, where an upload enters a review queue and can come back rejected.

The consequence cuts both ways. Nothing blocks a bad photo from going live on Toast, so the quality bar is entirely yours to hold. And nothing stops you fixing one the moment you notice it.

Toast is the most permissive of the four and still not a free pass. Online Ordering Pro accepts 1:1, 4:3 and 16:9, the widest range any of these platforms publishes, so a Toast-legal file exists for whichever delivery platform you also feed. That does not mean one file serves all of them.

Crop the same original three ways and every platform is satisfied. Upload one file everywhere and at least two of them are not.

Toast sits outside that table on purpose. The three platforms above run a moderation queue and can reject an upload, so their numbers are requirements. Toast's numbers are guidance for your own storefront, and Toast publishes three sets of them.