The passport office wants 35 x 45 mm. The school wants a small print for the record card. The online portal wants 600 x 600 pixels and under 100 KB. It is the same face in all three — only the numbers change. Here is how to get each one without taking a new picture every time.
Everything below starts from a single photo, so it is worth spending five minutes on it. Once you have a good one, you can make every size from it for years.
Take five or six. Pick the sharpest one. Keep the original file somewhere safe and never edit over it — always work on a copy, because each save loses a little quality.
Offices talk in millimetres. Screens and forms talk in pixels. These are not the same kind of measurement, and DPI is the bridge between them.
DPI means dots per inch — how many pixels get packed into one inch of print. Print work usually uses 300 DPI. So:
This is why the same passport photo is sometimes described as "35 x 45 mm" and sometimes as "413 x 531 pixels". Both are correct. If a form gives you millimetres and your tool asks for pixels, multiply the millimetres by 11.8 and you have the pixel number for 300 DPI.
One thing to remember: a photo printed at 300 DPI looks sharp. The same photo at 72 DPI looks fine on a screen but blurry when printed. If you plan to print, keep it at 300.
This is the strictest one, and the rules differ by country. Common sizes:
Size is only half of it. Biometric rules also say how much of the frame your head must fill, where your eyes must sit, and how plain the background must be. German rules, for example, ask for the face height to be roughly 32 to 36 mm within the 45 mm picture.
Use the Passport Photo maker: pick the country size, position your face inside the guide, and save. It can also place several copies on a 10 x 15 cm sheet, so a normal print shop prints them for about one euro instead of ten.
What the tool cannot do: it cannot tell you whether your expression, your glasses or your head covering meet the rules. Read the official requirements of the office you are applying to before you go. If you wear glasses, the safest choice is to take them off.
These are much more relaxed. Usually nobody gives you a size at all — they just say "bring a photo". In practice that means a small print, often 35 x 45 mm like a passport photo, sometimes a little bigger.
If no size is given, make it 35 x 45 mm. It fits every card holder and every record sheet, and nobody has ever complained that a photo was passport-sized.
If the school asks for a digital file for a portal, they usually want something small — a few hundred pixels wide and well under 1 MB. Use the Image Resizer for the dimensions, then the Image Compressor if the file is still too heavy.
This is where people lose the most time, because the portal gives you two numbers and they mean different things:
Do them in this order: resize first, compress second. If you compress first and then resize, you throw away quality for nothing, because resizing changes the file size again anyway.
If the portal gives you a shape that does not match your photo — a square 600 x 600 when your picture is a tall rectangle — crop it to a square first with Crop Image, then resize. Otherwise the face gets squashed.
If you want physical prints, do not send a single small photo to the print shop. Their machines print 10 x 15 cm, and one small picture on that sheet costs the same as eight.
The Passport Photo maker builds the sheet for you with the right number of copies, correctly spaced, with cutting lines. Take that one file to any drugstore photo machine and print it as a normal 10 x 15 photo.
| Where | Usual size | Which tool |
|---|---|---|
| Passport / ID (Europe) | 35 x 45 mm, 300 DPI | Passport Photo maker |
| US visa / green card | 2 x 2 inch, 600 x 600 px | Passport Photo maker |
| School, club, badge | 35 x 45 mm | Passport Photo maker |
| Online portal, pixels given | as stated | Crop, then Resizer |
| Online portal, KB limit given | as stated | Compressor |
| Print sheet for the shop | 10 x 15 cm | Passport Photo maker |
When a photo comes back rejected, it is almost never the size. It is usually one of these:
None of these can be fixed by any tool. They have to be fixed when you take the picture, which is why the five minutes at the start are worth it.
One picture, every size, no photo shop.