Your menu says what you serve. It says nothing about the room, the light in the afternoon, the wood oven, the terrace in June. Someone choosing between two places on their phone is choosing on feel, and a list of dishes can't carry that. The gallery is where the rest of it goes.
Once you have added a photo, Gallery appears in your menu bar next to About Us, and the page carries an Add or remove photos button that only you can see. Until then, clicking it takes you straight to the upload page. It is entirely optional — plenty of restaurants never add one.
It stays hidden until you use it
Until you upload your first photo, there is no Gallery link in your navigation and nothing for a diner to find. You'll see the link while you're signed in, so you can get to the page and fill it, but they won't.
Same as the About page: a link to an empty page is worse than no link at all.
What to put in it
Things a menu can't show. The dining room laid up before service. The bar. The view. Your garden in summer. The building from outside, so people recognise it when they arrive. A busy Friday night.
Not dish photos. Those belong on the dish itself, where they sit next to a price and the dietary and allergen labels. A plate in the gallery has none of that beside it, and the labels are the part that matters most.
Photographing people
A picture of a full room on a good night sells a restaurant better than almost anything else — but the people in it are recognisable, and it is going on a public website.
Ask them first. Most people say yes and are pleased to be asked. And don't post photographs of children without a parent's say-so.
Staff are worth asking too. Someone who has left may not want to still be the face of your terrace two years later.
Captions
Each photo can have a short caption, and all of them can be left blank. A caption is worth adding when the picture needs placing — "the upstairs room, laid for a party of twelve" tells someone something they can act on. "Our restaurant" does not.
How many you can add
6 photos during your free trial, and 36 once you're subscribed — enough to get a feel for it while you're trying the product, and more than most places use after that.
The limit only ever stops you adding a new photo. Nothing you have already uploaded is hidden or deleted, whatever happens to your subscription.
Putting them in order
Use the ↑ and ↓ buttons under each photo. The first one is the one most people will see, so lead with your best.
Photo sizes
JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP, up to 10MB each — a photo straight off a phone is usually 2–4MB, so it will fit. You can select several at once.
We resize them for the page automatically. Your diners are often on mobile data at a table, so what they download is a fraction of what you uploaded; the full-size originals stay safe and come back in Download my content exactly as you sent them.
A quiet bonus. If you use the text banner rather than an uploaded image, your first gallery photo becomes the preview picture that shows up when someone shares a link to your menu in a message or on Facebook. Without either, a shared link is just a grey box.