About
About this site.
Join Pinin is a short, practical guide to one thing: the photograph used at a funeral service — which one to choose, what may be changed, and what size every printed piece needs.
01 · Why it existsBecause the same six questions arrive every week, at the worst possible time.
The photograph at a funeral is arranged in a hurry, usually by one person, usually late at night, while also dealing with a registrar, a venue, a florist and a family. In that state, the technical facts — what a 16 × 20 needs in pixels, whether a phone photo of a print is usable, whether a face should be retouched — are impossible to research properly and easy to get wrong.
Most of the guidance that exists is written for a different occasion. It is about archiving a box of photographs over a period of years, or about getting the best possible restoration with no deadline. Neither applies when the service is on Thursday.
So this site is narrow on purpose. It is not about old photographs in general. It is about the photograph that has to be printed, mounted and standing on an easel in seventy-two hours.
02 · How it is writtenWhat we will not do to this reader.
No invented facts. The pixel requirements are arithmetic, and you can check them with a calculator. Where a size or a practice varies by country or by funeral home, the page says so and tells you to ask the funeral home, which is the only authority that matters.
No upselling. Some pages end with a link to Pinin's restoration service, because repair is sometimes what the week needs, and it would be dishonest to write about repairing photographs without saying who publishes the page. Several pages also say that printing what you have is better than waiting for a restoration, or that a photograph should not be altered at all. Both of those cost us work.
No cheerfulness. Nobody reading this wants a warm voice. They want the answer, in the order it is needed, without a story about somebody's grandmother first.
03 · The relationshipWho publishes this.
Join Pinin is written and published by the team behind Pinin, a photo restoration service. That is disclosed here, in the footer of every page, and in the metadata of the pages themselves, because a guide that recommends a service should say who runs it.
What that relationship does not change: the sizes and the arithmetic on this site are what a print shop would give you. The advice about what not to alter is the advice we would give a friend. Where automation is not good enough — and for a torn face it is not — the pages say so.
Corrections are welcome and are made on the page itself rather than in a changelog. Anything here that rests on a printing convention rather than on arithmetic is marked as a common practice, not a rule, because funeral homes and printers do differ and they are the ones you should ask.
Start where the week starts
The choice of photograph decides everything downstream, and it is the one decision no professional can make for you.
Which photograph to use