Passport photo print sheet

The step that costs money at a print shop

NEET candidates are told to keep six to eight passport photographs and four to six postcard ones. The Philippine civil service asks for four passport prints with a name tag. Almost every application in this category needs several physical copies of one photograph, and the way that normally happens is that somebody at a photo studio lays them out by hand and charges for it.

This does the layout. You get a sheet with as many copies as will fit, at the exact physical size the document requires, ready to hand over on a memory stick or print at home.

Millimetres, not pixels

Everything here is worked out in millimetres and rendered at 300 dots per inch at the end, because physical size is the entire point. A passport photograph that comes back from the shop 34 millimetres wide instead of 35 is not a passport photograph. The tool calculates how many photos fit inside the sheet's printable area after a 3 mm border, tries the sheet both portrait and landscape, and keeps whichever arrangement fits more — a 35 × 45 mm photo gets six onto a portrait 4 × 6 and eight onto a landscape one, which is not obvious and is worth two extra copies.

Why the JPEG has a DPI stamped into it

A canvas in a browser produces a JPEG whose header says the image has no physical size. Hand that to a print shop and their software scales it to fill the paper, and every photograph on the sheet comes out slightly wrong. So after the sheet is drawn, the real resolution is written into the file's JFIF header. The result is a file that genuinely says "print me at 300 dots per inch", which is the difference between a sheet you can cut up and a sheet you have to throw away.

The PDF option goes further: the page itself is created at the physical size of the sheet, in points, so there is nothing to interpret. Print it at 100% and do not tick "fit to page" — that setting is what defeats the whole exercise.

The border decides how many you get

Worth understanding, because it is the difference between four photos and six. Most printers cannot print to the very edge of the paper, so there is a 3 mm border by default and the crop marks live in it. For 35 × 45 mm photos that costs you nothing. For the American 2 × 2 inch size it costs you a third of the sheet: six 2 × 2 photos need exactly 4 × 6 inches with nothing left over, so with any border at all only four fit and with a 3 mm border only two.

Set the border to 0 and you get the classic 2 × 3 layout of six US passport photos on a 4 × 6 print — but your printer has to actually support borderless, or the photo shop has to. The result says when it has produced a borderless sheet so you know to check.

Cut guides in the margin, not between the photos

Crop marks are drawn as short ticks in the border, lined up with the edge of each row and column. Anything drawn in the gap between two photographs ends up as ink on the cut edge of somebody's passport photo. The ticks let you line a ruler up across the sheet and cut cleanly without leaving a line on the photos themselves. A 2 mm gap gives you something to cut down the middle of; set it to zero if you would rather cut a single shared edge.

Which photo to start from

Start from a correctly cropped ID photo, not a snapshot. Each tile is filled and cropped from the centre, so a photograph where your head is off to one side will be cropped off to one side eight times over. Make the photo first with the passport photo maker, check it with the compliance checker if it is for a passport, and then bring it here.