A photo you own, printed as a puzzle you can hold
A custom photo puzzle costs somewhere between £20 and £45, arrives in a week or two, and requires sending a family photograph to a company you have never dealt with. All three of those are avoidable. The printing already happens in your house; only the cut lines were missing.
Why this exists
The idea is small: a photo becomes a sheet of paper with the cut lines already drawn on it. Print it on the printer you already own, cut along the lines, and the photograph is suddenly an object with edges. Nothing about that requires a factory, and nothing about it requires an upload.
What was missing was the arithmetic. A jigsaw that actually fits back together needs every piece to tile with its neighbours to a fraction of a millimetre, and it needs the whole grid to land on the sheet at the size you asked for. That is the part worth building software for, and it is the part most online puzzle makers hide behind a checkout.
How it is built
Every page here is a static file, served as-is, sharing one global JavaScript namespace. No framework, no bundler, no build step, no third-party script in the render path, and no server-side code of any kind. That is not minimalism for its own sake — it is what makes the privacy claim possible. A page that cannot send a request cannot leak a photo, and a site with no application server has nowhere to store one.
The consequence is that everything runs at the speed of your own machine. Generating a 200-piece A3 sheet is a computation in your tab, not a round trip to a queue. It also means the site keeps working if this project stops being maintained, since the pages are just files.
Why it is free
There is no server to pay for. The pages are static files on a CDN, and the work that would normally happen on a server — decoding the photo, computing the grid, laying out the sheet — happens on the device of the person using it. That removes the cost that usually forces a subscription.
There is also no reason to charge for the thing this site is careful about. A tool that asks you to trust it with a photograph, and then monetises that photograph, has given up the only interesting part of the proposition.
What this site does not do
- It does not upload, store, or transmit your photo. The privacy page describes the one place data exists and how to erase it.
- It does not ask for an account, an email address, or a card.
- It does not sell printed puzzles, ship anything, or take custom orders.
- It does not show ads at the time of writing. If that ever changes it will be stated on the privacy page before it happens.
Why there are guides as well as a tool
Every failure mode of a home-printed puzzle is a printing problem rather than a puzzle problem: the sheet came out at 94%, the paper tore at the tabs, the photo was cropped too tight to be sharp, the back sheet was printed the wrong way round. Each of those has a measured answer on this site, and writing it down was cheaper than answering the same email repeatedly.
Six of them: print scale, paper weight, sheet and piece size, photo resolution, cut style, and numbered backs. One more covers a thirty-student set.
Who to talk to
One person maintains this: the code, the guides, and the inbox. Corrections to a measurement are especially welcome, because a wrong number here becomes a ruined print somewhere else. The address is on the contact page.
The whole tool is one page
Upload a photo, pick a grid, print at 100%. If it is your first time, read the print check first — it is the one mistake that ruins the sheet.