Adding a photograph to a funeral notice

We're improving the way photographs appear in newspaper notices.

Adding a photograph to a notice helps the notice to stand out in the newspaper, adding character and personality to a sensitive announcement.

We've worked to improve the photo-style notice by allowing the image to better fill the space. This improvement is now live when booking notices for newspapers in the North East, and will be rolled out across the rest of the country over the coming few weeks.

The example to the left shows how photo-style notices currently appear.

Our new photo-style notice (example left) puts greater emphasis on the image and will improve its quality when reproduced in a print newspaper.

Increasing the image size will increase the notice's size by 2cm (depth) - with no increase in cost as the notices are fixed price, up to 20cm (depth). The average size of newspaper notices across all of our titles is currently 5cm. We expect this will increase to 7cm, offering increased value to the family.

In an ideal world, the family would give you a good quality image showing the head and shoulders of their loved one to use in the funeral notice and order of service.

We understand that is often not the case and you may have to give the family a few pointers to help them choose the best photograph, so here are a couple of things to consider:

* ask the family if they have a photograph of their loved one on their own

* ask if they have a photograph showing the head and shoulders of their loved one.

If the family send in a group photo or a full-length image, take advantage of the cropping tool within our booking site to zoom in on the face as best you can. We check every notice prior to publication and if our team feel they can improve the image, they will change it for you.

If we book your notices for you, we will endeavour to crop the photograph to maximise the quality of the image in print.

If we feel there is nothing we can do to ensure the quality of the image once reproduced in print, we will contact you to let you know. The decision on whether to include the desired image or not will always sit with the family or yourselves on their behalf.