Passport Photo Maker

An ID photo has two measurable requirements: the frame is a specific size, and your head occupies a specific fraction of it. The second one is where home-made photos fail, and it is the one almost no online cropper shows you.

How to use it

1. Drop a head-and-shoulders photo onto the panel, taken against a plain, evenly lit background.
2. Pick the standard you are applying to.
3. Adjust zoom and offset until your chin and crown sit inside the dashed guide box.
4. Save the single image, or tick the sheet option and print a 6×4.

Head height is the requirement people miss

Every ID standard specifies not just the frame but how much of it your head must fill. The ranges are narrower than they sound and they differ noticeably between countries.

A US photo is square, 2×2 inches, and the head must measure 1 to 1⅜ inches from chin to crown — half to just over two thirds of the frame. There is also an eye-line rule: your eyes must sit between 1⅛ and 1⅜ inches up from the bottom edge.

A UK photo is 35×45mm portrait, and the chin-to-crown measurement should be 29 to 34mm, which is roughly 64 to 76 per cent of the height.

A Schengen photo is the same 35×45mm frame, but the head must fill 70 to 80 per cent of the height — visibly larger than a US photo in a smaller frame. A photo cropped for one is not valid for the other.

The guides here target the middle of each permitted range rather than an edge, because aiming at a boundary means half of all near-misses fail.

Where the numbers come from

The tool states the source for each standard, and it does not pretend they are all equally solid. The US figures come from the State Department directly, in inches. The Schengen 70–80 per cent range appears consistently across the EU visa code and consulate guidance. The UK’s 29–34mm head range comes from commercial photo services rather than gov.uk, which states the rule in prose without the millimetre figures — so it is marked as commercial, and the interface says to check the official page before printing.

That distinction is not pedantry. A rejected passport application costs weeks, and a tool that presents a number it half-guessed with the same confidence as one it read off a government page is doing you a disservice.

Background colour

The required background is not always white, and getting it wrong is the single most common reason a UK photo comes back. UK guidance wants light grey or cream; pure white leaves a scanner nothing to separate your head from. Schengen accepts light grey or white. US accepts white or off-white.

The tool can fill the frame with the correct tone for your chosen standard, which helps when your wall is slightly the wrong colour — but it fills the whole frame behind the crop, so it works with a plain background and not with a busy one. It does not cut you out from a bookcase.

The print sheet

A single 35×45mm image sent to a print shop wastes most of a 6×4 print and generally costs the same as a full sheet. The sheet option tiles as many copies as fit with cutting margins and draws a thin outline around each, so they can be separated with scissors. For 35×45mm that is eight photos; for US 2×2 inches it is six.

The resolution check

Below the preview the tool reports the effective dpi of your crop, calculated from the pixels actually inside the crop box rather than from the original file size. Cropping tightly into a small photo can easily leave you below 200 dpi, which prints visibly soft and can be rejected on quality grounds. Knowing that before you walk to a print shop is the whole point.

What it cannot judge

It crops and positions. It cannot tell whether you are smiling, whether there is a shadow behind your head, whether your glasses are catching the flash, or whether the photo is older than six months. Those are all rejection reasons, and they are all on you.