A cover photo has one job: to survive being cropped tall, shown small on a phone, and covered with your own names. Pick one with empty space above the faces and a calm patch where the words will fall, and you are most of the way there. Two things to know before you start looking through your camera roll. Most of the designs do not take a cover photo at all, and on the ones that do, the crop is set with two sliders rather than by dragging a box over the picture.
Not every design takes a cover photo
A handful of the designs are built for your own picture on the opening screen. The rest carry their own artwork, and a photograph on top of that would be one thing too many. So if a cover photo matters to you, narrow the field before you fall for a design for other reasons. Open the design gallery and see which covers are photographic.
Where the picture lands varies. Some fill the opening screen and set your names over the top; others hold it in a frame beside your names, or between the date and the venue. The editor is the quickest way to tell: a design that takes a cover photo has a photo section with an upload button, and two focus sliders appear once a picture is in it. On a design that does not, the section is simply absent.
Your photo is going to be cropped
A phone screen is tall and narrow. Most photographs you like are wide. The opening screen takes what it needs from the middle of your picture and discards the sides, so a wide shot of the two of you with the venue behind arrives as a narrow column with the venue gone. Group photos fare worst. A portrait taken the tall way round needs the least persuading, so ask for a few vertical frames if the shoot has not happened yet.
The crop control is two sliders, horizontal and vertical. Each moves the point the photo is anchored to, running the whole way from one edge to the other with the centre in the middle. That is all they do: no zoom, no straightening, no resizing. If the faces sit low in the frame, pulling the vertical slider down brings them back into view. If the two of you stand at opposite edges of a wide photo, no setting will hold both, and the answer is to crop a tall copy yourself before uploading.
Leave room for the words
Your names, your date and sometimes a line of wording sit on top of the picture, so much of the frame has to behave like a background. Photos that do that well have a few things in common.
- Empty space above the heads, or clear to one side, with nothing happening in it.
- A calm area where the text falls. Sky, a plain wall, water, foliage thrown out of focus. Railings, a crowd or a line of parked cars all fight the letters.
- Even brightness in that area. Text is one colour: it cannot be dark enough for a bright sky and light enough for a shadow at once.
- Faces away from the edges, and the two of you close together rather than at opposite ends of the frame.
Of the four, headroom decides most cases. A photo with the heads pushed against the top of the frame has nowhere for a name to go, and no slider will invent the space.
Check it on a phone, outdoors
The preview on your laptop, in a room with the blinds down, is the kindest light your invitation will ever be seen in. Guests will open it one-handed at a bus stop in the sun. So open your own invitation link on your phone, go outside, and read it. Pale lettering over a bright sky vanishes out there in a way it never does at your desk, and so does a thin script over a busy background. If you cannot read your own names at arm’s length in daylight, the photo is the wrong one, however good it is.
File size, and the guest on a slow connection
Some of your guests are on old phones and expensive data, and the cover photo is the first thing that has to load. What leaves your phone is not what reaches theirs: every upload is scaled down and re-encoded for the web on its way into storage, so the heavy original off your camera is never the file a guest waits for. A picture that arrives sideways is turned the right way up in the same pass, and the camera data travelling inside it is dropped there too, GPS coordinates included. A photo taken on your own front step does not hand your address to everyone you invite.
Two things still fall to you. Upload a JPEG or a PNG, and if the file is refused for being too large, export a smaller copy rather than screenshotting it, because a screenshot throws away more. And do not use the copy your photographer sent your sister, who forwarded it on to you in a chat. It has been squeezed twice already, and stretched across a phone screen it shows.
When to leave the cover photo out
Often the honest answer is that you should not use one. If you do not have a photograph you would happily hang on a wall, the design’s own cover artwork will beat an ordinary snap blown up to fill a screen. Nothing exposes a soft or badly lit picture like being the first thing somebody sees.
If your engagement shoot has not come back yet, send the invitation without a photo. A guest’s link points at the invitation itself rather than at a copy of it, so the week the photographs land you can put one on the cover and the links already sent show it. And if what you want is several photographs, the cover is the wrong place to ask: it is one picture, seen for a second, doing the job of a book jacket rather than an album.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change the cover photo after I have sent the invitation?
Yes. Replace it in the editor and anyone opening the invitation afterwards sees the new picture. The links you handed out point to the same place, so a swap costs nothing beyond the upload.
The faces are cut off after I upload. Can I fix it without changing the photo?
Usually. The default crop assumes the common case, a portrait with faces in the upper part of the frame, so a photo composed differently starts off wrong. Move the vertical slider until the faces sit where you want them, then the horizontal one. If the faces are at the far left and far right of a wide photo, crop a tall copy on your phone and upload that instead.
Do I need a professional photograph?
No. A sharp phone photo taken in soft daylight will do more for you than a poorly lit studio one. What matters is that it is in focus, bright enough to read text over, and quiet where the words go. Pictures taken indoors at night are the ones that disappoint at full-screen size.
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