Make a puzzle from your own photo

Any picture becomes a jigsaw in about a minute. Choosing the right picture is worth a little more thought than most people give it.

Any photograph can be a jigsaw. A holiday, a dog, a wedding, the view from a window — upload it and it is cut into pieces you can move around a table in your browser, and share with one link.

How it works

Go to create a puzzle and drop in a picture.
It is resized to 2400 pixels on its longest edge, which keeps the upload and the game quick without any visible loss at normal piece counts.
Choose a piece count and start. Share the link if you want company.

Everyone can do this. The free plan keeps one picture and cuts it into up to 200 pieces; membership keeps 20 and goes up to 2000. Storing and serving pictures is the part of this site that costs real money, which is why there is a limit at all rather than a wall.

Which of your photographs will make a good puzzle

Not the ones you would frame. A jigsaw is easy where the picture varies and hard where it repeats, so the qualities that make a photograph pleasant to look at — a clean background, a shallow depth of field, a lot of sky — are the ones that make it miserable to assemble.

Good: a busy street, a market stall, a cluttered kitchen table, a dog with visible fur texture, autumn leaves.
Harder than it looks: a portrait against a blurred background, a beach, anything with a large plain sky.
Nearly impossible: a snow scene, a night sky, a photograph of a wall.

This is worth a minute of thought before you upload, because a 500-piece puzzle of a cloudless sky is not a challenge, it is an ordeal. What makes a jigsaw hard goes into why in more detail.

As a thing to send someone

A photo puzzle travels well. Cut a picture from a holiday you took together, send the link, and solve it at the same time from different places — the pieces move under both your hands. It costs nothing and takes about a minute to set up, which makes it a better birthday message than most things that take a minute.