Deliveroo menu photos for every live market

The Deliveroo menu-photo rulebook, in one preset

Deliveroo's menu image specification is the operational layer of every restaurant on the platform across the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the Gulf, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia. The menu item photo — the single image rendered on the customer app card — is what decides whether a dish ends up in a basket, and Deliveroo's onboarding articles are explicit that menu items with photos see a substantial order lift over photo-less items in the same menu. The technical recommendation is 4:3 landscape at 1600×1200 px; Restaurant Hub accepts uploads as small as 1024×768 but flags them as needing improvement and demotes the items from carousel placements — the Top Picks rail, the Popular Near You rail, the discovery surfaces that drive most customer-side menu exploration. Deliveroo's CDN serves down from the master so the upload resolution caps how crisp the listing can ever look, and pro food photographers shooting for Deliveroo deliver 2400-class masters as a working target. The ratio that survives without auto-crop is 4:3 landscape across every live market.

The rules that move Restaurant Hub quality scoring are mostly about colour cast, framing, and provenance — the same shape as Uber Eats' rules but with a 1024×768 floor instead of a 1280×960 one. European pub, bistro, and trattoria fluorescent and incandescent lighting throws the strong yellow / orange / green cast that the quality classifier reads as appetite-killing — and the colour cast is the single most common recurring fix across UK, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch markets. Single-dish photos with the item filling 70%+ of the frame outperform multi-dish frames; the only exceptions are sharing platters, combo trays, and family-style offerings on a 'Sharing' or 'Combo' listing where the multi-component photo accurately depicts the combined offering. Stock photos used without licence get auto-detected — Deliveroo cross-references against known food-stock libraries — and trigger merchant flags. Visible competitor-app branding (Uber Eats logos, Just Eat / Takeaway.com containers, the merchant's direct-order URL on packaging) is forbidden. Text overlays, prices, nutrition badges, and discount text all get rejected on menu items; the cover banner at 16:9 at 1920×1080 is the one slot where styled compositions are permitted.

Why menu photos move orders across every Deliveroo market

Deliveroo's funnel is short — discovery surface to restaurant page to dish card to add-to-basket — and the dish card is where most customer-side decisions happen. The order lift on menu items with photos is consistent across every live market, and the lift is even larger when the photo is single-dish, well-lit, and free of the yellow European-pub-light cast that signals low effort. Restaurants that ship a consistent menu-photo set across all 25-40 items outperform restaurants with photos only on top sellers, because the consistency reads as a developed brand instead of a part-time effort. The preset's white-balance correction is the single highest-impact fix for the recurring fluorescent-light yellow cast, and the 4:3 single-dish discipline is what gets items into the Popular Near You and Top Picks rails that carry most photo-led traffic. Multi-language merchants benefit twice — the same image-only export drops into every Restaurant Hub locale (UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin) without per-market re-prep.