Photo jigsaws have long been a favourite personalised gift and are a great way to share a family portrait as a fun present. The most popular photo jigsaws have to be pictures of children as gifts for grandparents, but they’re also a great way to really fix a holiday photo or portrait of a loved one in your mind forever.
Hello, this is Mat from freephotoprinting.co.uk. Today I’m making a photo jigsaw and I thought I’d make a video if it and show you how easy it is to make one of your own.
Starting here on the jigsaws page of our site which you can find under the photo gifts menu, you’ll see we have some jigsaw making tips here, we have a price comparison showing the price of getting your own photo jigsaw made from the various providers and we have our recommendations for the top providers to use. We check the prices weekly and we update our recommendations frequently based on the range of products they offer, the quality of those products, the service you get and the price that they offer, so it’s always a good choice to use the best four for any of the photo gifts.
We’re going to go with Printerpix. If I click ‘get yours’ it’ll take us straight through to the puzzles page of their website. One of the reasons we choose Printerpix for the photo puzzles as our top recommendation is they offer quite a good range of puzzle options. They have three different sizes from A5 up to A3 and two different backings; board and wooden, and the end result (the quality) is very nice as well. Their page has all the information about the products, it’s got the number of pieces there, it’s got the reviews at the bottom but for now I’m just going to make the choices and get on with making my puzzle.
I’m going to go with the wooden back puzzle, I think as a gift they make a nicer quality gift and I’m going to go with A4, that’s plenty big enough. To get started we simply choose the size that we want and the finish we want and click ‘choose photo’. That will open up a familiar explorer window, choose the picture you want to use, click open and it’ll start uploading. They upload quite quickly, the time it takes depends on the speed of your connection and the size of that image, but it usually happens quite quickly. There we go, that one’s done. When that’s uploaded it’s going to offer me a little upgrade deal here, it says I can stick with my option I’ve got or for just £3 extra I can go for the A3 twice the size. It’s a good offer but it’s not the one I’m going to do today.
There we are. We’re now into the photo editing screen. You’ll see this is what we call a bounding box. This shows what’s going to come out on that puzzle there. As you can see, my image is in the wrong format. I’ve got mine portrait and the shape of the jigsaw is landscape. I can just come down to the bottom here, I can rotate that, I’m going to get a much better fit and then I can just move the box to line it up exactly how I want that image. You can also see that it’s given me an indication of the photo quality. In here it’s 5 out of 5 which is brilliant. The photo quality is about the resolution of the image compared to the size of the product you’re going to do. If for instance I changed it to an A3 product, twice the size, it’s the same image, you’ll see that the overall finished quality is going to come down a little bit. 4 stars is absolutely fine, three you’re going to get away with it depending on the final image. However, I’m at five stars for that A4 image and that’s exactly what I want. All I have to do now is click ‘add to basket’ and it’s checking out just like any other shop.
I hope that’s been helpful, I hope that inspires you to try a photo gift of your own. If you have any questions or have any feedback, or want to share photos of your own photo gifts please find us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/freephotoprinting).
There are great quality jigsaws available as well as cheap ones. See our "Best for..." list on the left for our recommendations to the best providers.
Jigsaws are usually bigger than prints and don't benefit from being backlit like your phone screen. You want to choose an image that will look good in print and will be clear enough to make a good jigsaw from. You can always use one of our free print offers to check the images before you commit if you want!
Jigsaws with more pieces will generally be more difficult. Small jigsaws with a lot of pieces will also mean very small pieces, which can be taxing on the eyes – particularly if you are buying as a gift for an older person.
Busy images make for difficult puzzles and images that are not very defined can be frustrating. Go big and bold for a simple puzzle, complex & repeating for something harder.
A message in the photo of the jigsaw can work really well, as it only becomes clear as the recipient pieces the puzzle together. Writing in the sand of a beach, a sign held by a child or magnetic letters on a fridge door can all add a touch of magic to the gift of a personalised photo jigsaw puzzle.
We love a gift that lasts, which is why we were attracted to Printerpix and their wooden photo puzzle option. For a couple of pounds extra you can have your photo printed on to a wooden puzzle rather than the standard board, keeping it looking new for longer. Printerpix also offer 3 sizes on their puzzles, which is another great option.
Jigsaws from
£9.98
Pixum offer a 266 piece puzzle, which makes for a more challenging gift. More challenge means more value, so we like this option.
Jigsaws from
£9.99