Upload a photo, get a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle

Any picture on your computer or phone can become a jigsaw: the holiday photo, the wedding group shot, the dog, a screenshot of the game you played together in 2009. Upload it on the home page, pick a piece count and shape, and share the lobby link with whoever should help. No account, no watermark, nothing to buy.

How it works

1. On the home page choose Upload a photo and pick a JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF of up to 20 MB.
2. The server turns it into a JPEG of at most 1600 pixels on the long side, plus a 400 pixel thumbnail. Phone photos are rotated the right way up using their orientation tag, and the original file's metadata is not kept.
3. Choose pieces (24 to 1500), a shape and whether pieces rotate, then press Create lobby.
4. Share the room link. Everyone who opens it plays on your photo, live, with cursors.

What happens to your photo

This is exactly what the server does, no more:

• The resized JPEG and its thumbnail are stored on our server under a random 12-character id. They are not listed anywhere.
• They are served to anyone who requests that address, which in practice means the people you gave the room link to.
• A room is deleted after 12 hours with nobody in it, and its photo is deleted at the same moment.
• An upload that never ends up in a room (you uploaded and then closed the tab) is deleted after 24 hours.
• The original file you uploaded is never stored; only the resized copy exists.

So the lifetime of a photo here is "as long as someone is still playing it, plus 12 hours". If you want to keep a puzzle going for a week, someone has to open it once a day. The privacy page covers the rest of the site in the same spirit.

Which photos make good puzzles

• Detail everywhere. A market street, a crowded table, a garden. Big flat areas (sky, white walls, studio backgrounds) are the slow part of any jigsaw.
• Sharp and well lit. The image is downsized to 1600 pixels, so a blurry snapshot stays blurry; that is fine at 100 pieces and painful at 1000.
• Landscape or square. Tall portrait photos work, but the board is easier to keep on screen when it is wider than it is high.
• Group photos are a favourite: everyone in the call gets to assemble their own face. 300 pieces for a small group; 500 to 750 if the photo is busy.

Ideas

• A wedding or birthday photo as a surprise puzzle for the people in it.
• A shared holiday: each evening a different photo from that day.
• Remote teams: the office, the product, the founding-day photo. See virtual team building.
• Kids' drawings at 24 or 48 pieces, solved together with a grandparent on a video call.

Questions

Which files can I upload?

JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF, up to 20 MB. The long side must be at least 300 pixels. Animated files use their first frame.

Does the upload keep my location data?

No. The photo is re-encoded as a plain JPEG on the server, which drops the original file's metadata (EXIF, including GPS). Its orientation tag is applied first so sideways phone photos come out the right way up.

How many pieces can my photo have?

Any count from 24 to 1500. Uploads are resized to at most 1600 pixels on the long side, so at 1000 pieces and above use a sharp, detailed photo.

Can I get the photo back or share it outside the room?

The image is served from an unguessable address for as long as the room exists, and everyone in the room sees it. It is not a photo hosting service: once the room is gone, so is the file.

Is there a limit on uploads?

Yes, a light one: 10 uploads and 30 new rooms per hour per network address, to keep the server free for everyone.