Why More Customers Don’t Order Panoramic Canvas Prints

As an insider in the photo printing business, I can’t begin to count the number of photos I’ve printed over the almost 20 years I’ve been in the trade.  Although I’ve always focused exclusively on personalised wall decor of one type or another, my company has experimented with different types of personalised print products like acrylic prints, metallic prints and other novel ways of presenting personalised prints.

But in all that time, printing all kinds of photos in all kinds of ways, I’ve noticed one particular thing that many customers forget to do when printing their photos. With that in mind, in this blog post, I want to look at this blind spot in a little more detail and maybe inspire some people to approach their photo printing projects with a fresh perspective in 2024.

So What’s The Typical Approach with Photo Printing Online?

I realise this is not scientific and maybe it’s just my experience or maybe I’m just looking for a clever excuse to write a new blog post…BUT….what I tend to see a lot with photo printing - especially wall decor like photos on canvas or framed prints is that a customer tends to look at a photo on their phone and let the shape of the photo as it was taken determine the shape of the print on the wall.

In other words, many people forget to stop and ask themselves if the photo was composed with the right shape in mind or whether the photo would in fact suit a different shape when printed. 

So What’s The Big Deal About The Shape?

Well, for me shape - or composition - is one of the fundamentals in photography and it’s no different when it comes to printing - whether that’s a canvas print or framed print or one of our wooden photo blocks. Just because the photo was originally taken in a portrait mode doesn’t mean a different approach to cropping would suit it better.  Many people tend to forget about cropping their photo to a more unusual shape - particularly square or panoramic canvas prints. 

Unusual Shapes Will Stand Out on The Wall

So what do I mean by unusual shapes? Well for me, the two shapes that are a little different and stand out a bit more are square and panoramic.  Our biggest square print is 100x100cm but a really nice square size that would fit the typical house in Ireland would be anything up to 60x60cm. For a canvas print, you’d be amazed at how a simple change in shape can add extra impact to your wall.

And it can be even more dramatic with panoramic canvas prints - whether on canvas, in a frame or on our wood blocks.  We’ve got a gorgeous 90x30cm wood block in stock which is a fantastic 3:1 aspect ratio but we don’t print many of them unfortunately.  This sort of shape would particularly suit a lot of landscape or seascape prints that we print loads of but very few people think of cropping to this sort of ratio. Such a shame!

Photo Printing Websites Should Be More Helpful and Proactive

As someone who runs an online photo canvas printing business, maybe I need to ask myself if it’s my fault that customers are forgetting about the different shape options they could select when they make their order. 

And I think there is an issue here - websites like mine could be better designed to help customers think about more creative crop options for their canvas print or framed print.  

We built our site to recognise the shape of the customer’s photo and then start by showing ratios that match the photo.  But perhaps that’s just encouraging customers to print the image in that shape instead of looking at the other options that are available? 

What We’re Doing to Help You Find The Right Shape

With this in mind, at the start of this year I decided to offer people the opportunity of booking a free consultation with me to discuss their photos before we print them.  It’s completely free and there’s no obligation to print with us.  But it might just spark some ideas or catch some problems before a print gets ordered.  We’ll see how it goes - hopefully it will help to address this issue and we can start seeing some more creative shape choices for photos on canvas or our other wall decor options.

Here’s to thinking outside the shape box!