How to prepare artwork for Etsy prints

Pixels decide your maximum print size

Print sharpness is measured in dots per inch. At the 300 DPI standard, every 300 pixels becomes one inch of sharp print. So a 3600-pixel-wide image prints sharply up to 12 inches wide, and no further.

This is why the app shows your maximum print size the moment you upload. It is a property of your file, not a setting.

One file covers every size in its ratio

Print sizes come in families that share a shape. 4×6, 8×12, 16×24 and 24×36 are all 2:3. Because the proportions match, a single 2:3 file serves all of them — the print shop scales it to whichever the buyer ordered.

That is why the app produces one file per ratio rather than one per size, and why “Process All 5 Ratios” gives you five files rather than thirty.

Fit or crop — something has to give

Your artwork will rarely match a print ratio exactly, so either the edges get trimmed or the frame gets padded.

Fit keeps the entire design and adds a border. Right for posters, banners and anything with text or detail near an edge. Set the border to match your artwork colour and it often disappears into the design.

Crop fills the frame and discards the overflow. Right for photographs and open compositions, where a border looks wrong and the edges are incidental.

The app shows how much border fit will add before you commit, so you can compare.

Match orientation to your artwork

Landscape artwork in a portrait frame loses most of its width, or gains an enormous border. The app defaults to your source’s own orientation, and warns you if you switch away from it.

Formats and Etsy's limits

Etsy allows five digital files per listing, up to 20MB each. PNG is lossless and best quality, and individual PNG prints usually fit comfortably. The ZIP of all five ratios often does not — it is one file as far as Etsy is concerned.

If you hit that limit, either upload the ratios individually or switch the output to JPEG, which is several times smaller at a quality difference no print will show.

Opening an Etsy shop, if you haven't yet

You don't need a shop to use most of this — the print files, mockups, ad video and listing copy all work without one. You only need a shop to publish directly to Etsy.

To open one, go to etsy.com/sell and follow the setup. It takes about twenty minutes: shop name, currency, a payment method, and one listing to get started. Etsy charges a small fee per listing plus a percentage of each sale — worth reading their current fee schedule before you commit, since the numbers change.

A few things specific to selling digital downloads:

• Set the listing type to digital. Buyers download immediately after paying and there's nothing to post.
• You can attach five files per listing, 20MB each — which is exactly the five print ratios this tool produces.
• Only sell artwork you own or have a commercial licence for. Etsy suspends shops for copyright and trademark infringement, and that means the whole shop rather than the one listing.
• Digital downloads have no shipping profile and no postage, which makes them a considerably simpler place to start than physical prints.

Once your shop exists, come back and connect it — the app will then put finished drafts straight into it for you to review.

What AI Enhance can and cannot do

Enhance reconstructs detail lost to low resolution. It genuinely helps a small but sharp file print larger.

It cannot recover detail your camera never captured. A photo that is out of focus or motion-blurred will come out larger and just as blurry, because the information was never there. No tool can fix that; anything that appears to is inventing pixels.

Restore mode rebuilds faces from a learned model, which is useful on degraded artwork and unsuitable for photographs of people — it will alter eyes and features. Use Upscale for anything with a person in it.