ID photo compliance checker

The check every other site charges you for

There is no shortage of sites that will make you a compliant passport photo. There is nothing that will tell you, for free, what is wrong with the one you already have. That is the wrong way round: the useful moment is before you pay an application fee, not after a rejection letter.

So this measures your photo against a chosen country's published rules and tells you what it finds — every number, with the method stated, and an honest gap where something cannot be measured.

What is actually measured

Pixel dimensions and shape against the physical size the standard specifies. File size against the limit, where there is one. Whether the photo is genuinely in colour rather than a greyscale image saved as RGB. Whether exactly one face is present. The height from your chin to the top of your head, converted into millimetres using the standard's own physical dimensions. Where your eye line sits above the bottom edge, which the United States specifies and most other countries do not. Whether your face is centred and whether your head is level. How uniform the background is — measured as the spread of colour across the pixels that are not you, which is what actually catches a shadow on the wall. And whether the face is sharp, measured on a normalised crop so the score means the same thing on a small photo as on a large one.

Where the head measurement comes from

A face detector gives a box that ends at the jaw, so it can tell you where your chin is but not where the top of your head is. The crown comes from a separate step: the subject is separated from the background, and the highest pixel that is still you, across the width of your face, is the top of your head with hair included. That is what passport offices measure to in practice. If you have unusually voluminous hair the number will run high, and that is a real effect rather than an error — it is also how the human at the counter will read it.

Canada is the one people get wrong

Canada asks for 31 to 36 millimetres from chin to crown on a 70 millimetre photograph, which is a much smaller head in a much larger frame than any other common standard. A photo that would pass in the United States, where the head may be up to 35 mm of a 51 mm frame, is usually far too tightly cropped for Canada. The checker does that arithmetic rather than leaving it to you.

What it cannot tell you

It does not judge your expression, whether your glasses are reflecting, whether a head covering is permitted for your application, or whether the photo is recent enough. Those are human decisions and no measurement replaces them. Where a country publishes no head-size range — the Philippines and Brazil, for two — the measurement is reported and deliberately not given a verdict, because inventing a threshold and having somebody trust it would be worse than saying nothing.