Short answer: fewer than the camera ads suggest, until suddenly more. A megapixel count is really just the dimensions of the photo measured in millions of pixels, and what you need depends entirely on how big the photo will be seen and from how far away. Here is the translation I give clients when we plan commercial photography and talk about where the images will live.
A LinkedIn profile photo displays a few hundred pixels wide. A full width website hero image might display around two thousand pixels wide. Even a large monitor shows far fewer pixels than any modern camera captures. For screen use, a modest file is genuinely plenty, which is why the enormous files from a pro camera get sized down for web delivery as a matter of routine. Sharpness, light and expression matter at these sizes, not raw pixel count.
Print quality is usually measured in dots per inch, with about 300 considered detailed at reading distance. That math means a sharp 8 by 10 print wants roughly 2400 by 3000 pixels, about 7 megapixels, and a 16 by 20 wants about four times that. This is where a professional camera's resolution stops being a spec sheet number and becomes the difference between a print that holds up and one that goes soft.
The surprise: billboards need surprisingly little resolution per inch, because nobody reads them from a foot away. Viewing distance changes everything. A photo that would look soft held in your hand can look perfect on a building across a highway. So the honest answer to the megapixel question is always another question: where will this photo live, and how far away will people stand? Answer that, and the math is easy.
For small website images, often yes on paper, because the file has enough pixels. Where phones fall short is usually light, lens quality and depth, not the megapixel count. Resolution is only one of the things that makes a photo hold up big.
Within reason. Viewing distance rescues a lot: prints viewed from across a room do not need the same detail density as prints held in the hand, and good software can scale a clean file up gracefully. A sharp, well lit smaller file prints better than a blurry bigger one.
Ask for files sized to your uses, plus a full size master if you print. Huge files are slow to upload and share, and most platforms compress them down anyway. The master stays archived here, so a bigger version is always one call away.
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