2026-10-10

Submitting a photo for an obituary? What newspapers' own photo rules say, and what a background cutout actually fixes

Writing an obituary usually has a deadline attached, and most local papers publish their own written rules for the one photo that will run with it. Those rules are specific — file format, resolution, a price for a second photo — and they're set by the paper, not by any single national standard. What they rarely solve is the photo itself: a lot of families' clearest shot of someone who just passed is a vacation snapshot, a work party photo, or a reunion group shot, with whatever was behind that person still in the frame.

What newspapers' own photo pages actually ask for

Every outlet below publishes its own rules, and they don't agree with each other. The Chicago Sun-Times' own obituary and public notice FAQ asks for JPEG only, "at least 200 dpi (dots per inch) at the size they will be printed," and a file size of "2 MB (2,000 KB) or smaller." The Central Virginian's own obituary photo guidelines ask for JPG files only — not placed inside a PDF or Word document — at a minimum of 150 dpi, and explicitly say not to resize the photo before sending it; the paper adds that if a photo needs significant correction it may charge a $25 photo-editing surcharge, and its submission deadline is Mondays at 5pm. Western Wayne News, an Indiana paper, says plainly: "We are only able to run one photo per obituary," that "photos and obituaries are always printed in black and white," and that "we usually crop obituary photos to have the person's head fill up most of the frame" unless you ask for a different crop. California's Santa Maria Sun runs one photo at no extra charge and charges "$20 for additional photo," capped at "2 photos max per obituary." None of these four papers' own numbers match each other on dpi, file size, photo count, or price — which is exactly why checking your own paper's page matters more than following a generic rule.

Why a tight crop doesn't remove what's behind the person

Western Wayne News's own instruction — crop "to have the person's head fill up most of the frame" — describes a crop, not a cutout. Filling the frame with a head makes a photo usable at small newsprint size, but it doesn't touch whatever is still visible at the edges: a crowd behind a birthday table, a car door, a coworker's shoulder in a group photo cropped down to one face. And because most of these papers run exactly one photo, free — a second one costs extra where it's offered at all, and some papers don't offer one — families aren't choosing from a deep set of clean portraits. They're usually sending in whichever single photo shows the person's face clearly, cluttered background included, because it's the one they have.

There's a quieter reason to do that cleanup on-device rather than through a random upload tool: the photo going into an obituary is often one of the last clear pictures a family has of someone, handled under a Monday-afternoon deadline while everyone involved is already exhausted. NearBG's background removal and its manual touch-up brush both run entirely in the browser tab, so that photo never has to leave the device it's already on just to get the background out of the way before it's sent to a paper.

What a cutout can't fix

NearBG removes a background and exports a transparent PNG — it doesn't do any of the four papers' specific requirements above. It doesn't convert the file to JPEG, which is the only format the Sun-Times, the Central Virginian, and Western Wayne News all say they accept — you'll still need to flatten or re-save the cutout as a JPEG in whatever software you're using before you send it in. It doesn't composite the cutout onto any background color. It doesn't add resolution a low-quality source photo never had, so a photo that's below a paper's own 150-200 dpi minimum stays below it after the background is removed. It doesn't convert anything to black and white the way Western Wayne News prints every photo it runs. And it has no say in how many photos a paper will run or what it charges for a second one — that's the paper's own pricing, not a setting in an editing tool.

A practical checklist

• Find your own paper's obituary photo page first — format, dpi, file-size limit, photo-count limit, and second-photo pricing differ paper to paper, and the four papers above don't even agree with each other.
• Start from the clearest, highest-resolution original you have — a phone or camera original, or a careful scan of a print, not a screenshot or a photo of a screen.
• If the one clear photo you have shows a crowd, a car, or a cluttered room behind the person, drop it into NearBG and let the on-device model remove the background, then use the touch-up brush to clean up stray pixels around hair or a shoulder — all of it in the browser, nothing uploaded.
• Re-save or export the result as a JPEG before submitting, since none of the papers above accept a transparent PNG file — NearBG only produces the cutout, not the final file format a paper requires.
• Confirm your paper's photo-count limit and any extra-photo price before you prepare more than one image, and send it in ahead of the paper's own deadline in case a different crop is requested.

The honest summary

A transparent cutout fixes exactly one thing in an obituary photo: whoever was behind the person that day — a crowd, a car, a cluttered room — no longer competes with their face in the one or two photos a paper will actually run, and that cleanup happens without uploading what might be one of the last clear photos a family has. It doesn't convert the file to the JPEG format every paper above requires, doesn't add resolution a low-quality original never had, doesn't print anything in black and white, and doesn't set how many photos a paper allows or what a second one costs — those stay exactly what they were before the cutout: real format, resolution, and pricing rules set by the newspaper running the obituary, not by a background-removal tool.