Questions and answers

You take or choose a photo, pick the country or document, and the tool does the rest: it finds your face, turns the photo so your eyes are level, crops it so your head is the size the rules ask for, and places the copies on a sheet you can print. You can drag and zoom the photo yourself if you want it a little different.

Yes. Making the photo, the print sheet and the file for online forms costs nothing, and there is no watermark. The only thing you pay for is the print itself, which is the price of one normal 4 × 6 photo at a drugstore or photo kiosk.

No. It runs in the browser on a phone, tablet or computer. You do not need an account to make a photo.

The United States (passport, visa, DV lottery, green card), the United Kingdom, Schengen and EU countries, India (applied for from the USA), Australia, China, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. There is a general 35 × 45 mm setting that fits most other countries, and a custom setting where you type the size yourself. The full list is on the photo sizes page.

Yes, the size rules are the same. The hard part is the photo itself. Lay the baby on a plain white sheet and take the photo from above, with no hands, toys or pacifier in the picture. For a baby under one year most countries do not insist on open eyes or a neutral face, but check the rules for yours. If the tool cannot find the face, line the photo up with the guide lines by hand.

This happens with very dark photos, faces turned to the side, photos taken from far away, or when something covers part of the face. You can still drag and zoom the photo so the hair touches the top line and the chin sits in the green band. If the photo is dark or blurry, retaking it near a window usually fixes it.

• Stand about 2 feet in front of a plain white or light wall, so your shadow does not fall on it.
• Face a window or a lamp, so the light hits your face evenly from the front.
• Ask someone to hold the phone 4 to 5 feet away, level with your eyes. Selfies bend the face, and some offices reject them.
• Leave space around your head and shoulders. The tool does the cropping.
• Look straight at the camera, eyes open, mouth closed. No glasses, no hat, no headphones.

It can make a plain background white or light gray, or just remove shadows and keep the wall’s own color. It needs a fairly smooth wall to work with, and clothes that are darker than the wall.

Be careful with this if you are applying in the United States. The State Department tells applicants not to change photos with software or apps, and an edited background is one of the reasons it gives for rejecting photos. A white bed sheet or a poster board taped to the wall is the safer fix.

For a US passport or visa, no. Glasses have to come off unless you have a signed note from a doctor. Many other countries allow glasses as long as there is no glare and the frames do not cover your eyes, but taking them off avoids the question.

No. It crops, straightens, and adjusts the overall brightness and color of the whole photo. It never smooths skin, changes the shape of anything, or removes marks. Passport offices compare the photo with your face, so a retouched photo is a rejected photo.

Save the sheet as a JPG and order it as a normal 4 × 6 inch photo print at any drugstore, supermarket photo counter or online photo service. It usually costs well under a dollar. You can also print at home on glossy or matte photo paper.

Wherever you print, turn off “fit to page”, “borderless expansion” and automatic enhancement, so the photo comes out at its true size.

Every sheet has a scale line printed under the photos. It is exactly 2 inches long on inch-based sizes and exactly 50 mm on the others. Hold a ruler against it before you cut. If the line is off by more than about 1 mm, the lab or the printer has resized the page. Print again with a white border, or choose “actual size” or “100%”.

Photo paper, glossy or matte. Plain office paper is rejected almost everywhere. Some countries ask for matte specifically, Singapore for example.

Yes. Step 4 in the tool saves a single JPG cropped to the exact proportions, and you can set the largest file size your form allows. For US visa and DV lottery forms the 240 KB limit is already filled in.

Yes. After the last step, type your email address and choose which files you want. This is handy when you make the photo on your phone but want to print from a computer. We do not keep the photo or your address after the email has gone.

No. The face detection, cropping and sheet layout all run inside your browser, on your own phone or computer. The photo is not sent to us, and we could not look at it if we wanted to. The one exception is if you ask us to email the finished files to you. In that case the files pass through our server on their way to your inbox and are deleted as soon as the email is sent.

The full details are in the privacy policy.

We count how many photos are made, for which country, and whether it was on a phone or a computer. That tells us whether the tool is working for people. There is no advertising tracker on this site and no analytics company sees your visit.

No, and nobody honestly can. The tool gets the size, the head position and the framing right, and it warns you about problems it can measure, such as a dark background or a tilted head. It cannot judge everything an officer looks at, such as your expression, a shadow across one cheek, or how recent the photo is. Read the check list under the photo, and compare the result with the official rules for your country before you send it.

The rejection notice normally says why. Lighting and shadows are the most common reason by far, followed by glasses and an old photo. Retake the photo with that one thing fixed and run it through the tool again. If you think the tool got the size wrong, tell us which country and what the notice said, and we will look into it.

Some in-app browsers (the ones that open inside Facebook, Instagram or a messaging app) block downloads. Open the site in Safari or Chrome instead. If a picture appears under the button after you press it, press and hold the picture and choose “Save”.