ID Photo Maker with Your Webcam | Passport & Visa Sizes
Take one webcam shot and get passport, visa, resume and licence photos in every size at once. Face alignment guide, background colour replacement and a print sheet you can run off at a photo kiosk for pennies. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
ID photo sizes
Different documents need different sizes. This tool covers the specifications below, and a single shot can produce as many of them as you need.
| Document | Size (W × H) | Head size (crown to chin / margin above) | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passport (Japan) | 35 × 45mm | 34mm (32–36mm) / 4mm (2–6mm) | Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs specification. Borderless, plain background including no shadows, taken within six months |
| My Number card (Japan) | 35 × 45mm | Uses the passport placement (convention) | Dimensions are official. Face-on, no hat, plain background, within six months. Head size is not formally specified |
| Resume / general | 30 × 40mm | 26mm (24–28mm) / 4mm (3–6mm) (convention) | The most common size for job applications and professional exams in Japan |
| Driving licence (Japan) | 24 × 30mm | 20mm (18–22mm) / 3mm (2–4mm) (convention) | Dimensions are official. No hat, face-on, head and shoulders, plain background, within six months |
| US visa | 51 × 51mm | 30mm (25–35mm) / 8mm (6–12mm) | US Department of State specification (2 × 2 inch square, head 50–69% of the image height) |
Figures marked "convention" cover cases where the print dimensions are fixed but the head size is not formally specified; those values follow common practice. If the body you are applying to publishes its own criteria, follow theirs instead.
How to print your photo
A file on its own is not something you can submit. ID photos have to be printed at actual size on photo paper. Here are three routes with different trade-offs between cost and effort. In every case, printing one sheet from the "Lay out for printing" feature gives you several photos at once.
Option 1: a self-service photo kiosk (quickest)
Machines in pharmacies, supermarkets and photo shops print onto genuine photo paper, so the result is good enough to submit, and you can walk out with it in half an hour.
- Download the sheet image using "Lay out for printing" above.
- Take the file to the kiosk on a USB stick or memory card, or upload it through the retailer's app or website if they offer one.
- Choose photo printing rather than document printing, and select the paper size that matches the sheet you generated (L size, 127 × 89mm, or the closest 4 × 6 inch option).
- Print borderless, with any "fit to paper" or zoom option turned off.
- Cut along the printed guide lines with a craft knife and a steel ruler.
| Typical cost | Roughly the price of a single photo print, typically a few tens of cents. A passport-sized layout yields three photos per sheet |
|---|---|
| Watch out for | Document printing puts the image on plain paper, which will not be accepted. If the machine offers a scaling option, set it to 100%: even a two-millimetre reduction takes the photo outside the specification |
Option 2: print at home
The fastest route if you already keep photo paper in the house. The catch is that printer settings are easy to get wrong, and a wrong setting quietly changes the dimensions.
- Download the sheet image and load photo paper the same size as the sheet. Plain paper has too rough a surface and is often rejected.
- Open the image and set the paper size and the paper type (glossy photo paper) in the print dialog.
- Turn borderless printing on and set scaling to none (100%). Do not use "fit to page" or "shrink to fit".
- Run a test print and measure the photo with a ruler (35 × 45mm for a passport) to confirm the size is right.
- Print the final copy and cut along the guide lines.
| Typical cost | Paper and ink, roughly 10–30 cents per sheet |
|---|---|
| Watch out for | Some home printers enlarge the image by a few percent in borderless mode. Always measure a test print. If it comes out oversized, reducing the "borderless expansion" setting usually fixes it |
Option 3: order from an online print service or photo shop
Worth it when you care about the finish or need a lot of copies. Delivery takes a few days, so this is the option for when you are not against a deadline.
- Download either the sheet image or the individual sizes.
- Upload the file to an online photo printing service, or hand it in at a photo shop counter.
- Ask for glossy photo paper, printed borderless at actual size. Turn off any automatic cropping.
- Cut the delivered print along the guide lines.
| Typical cost | A few cents per print plus postage. Collecting in store avoids the postage |
|---|---|
| Watch out for | If the order form offers to "automatically correct the position of the face" or "crop to fit", switch it off. Those options will undo the dimensions you carefully set here |
Tips
- Stand about a metre from the camera. Any closer and the wide-angle lens enlarges your nose, which changes how you look. Backing off and zooming in gives a much truer image.
- Light your face from the front. Ceiling lighting alone drops shadows under your eyes and nose. Sitting facing a window in daylight is the best result you can get with no equipment at all.
- Even when you replace the background, shooting against a plain wall gives a better result. A cluttered background makes the hairline harder to detect and the outline turns soft.
- Most authorities require a photo taken within the last six months. Note the date if you plan to reuse the file later.
- Always print borderless and at 100%. Printing with "fit to page" shrinks the image by a couple of millimetres, which puts it outside the required dimensions.
Frequently asked questions
Side Note — Why ID photos dictate the size of your head
Read an ID photo specification closely and you will find it does not stop at the size of the print. It goes on to demand 34 ± 2mm from the crown of the head to the chin, and a margin above the head of 4 ± 2mm. That looks fussy until you remember what the photo is for. Too small and the features cannot be distinguished; too large and the outline of the head is cropped away, taking the shape of the face with it. The International Civil Aviation Organization set an international standard for travel documents, and because most countries follow it, a photo cut to the Japanese passport specification works almost anywhere.
The booth on the street corner is such a fixture that it is easy to forget someone had to invent it. Japan got its first automatic photo booth in 1962, when developing the print took several minutes and waiting beside the machine was simply part of the deal. Decades of digitisation later the booths are still there, and the reason is reassurance: whatever else happens, the print that drops out is the right size. The counterpart to that reassurance is the price, and the fact that every retake costs the same again.
What surprises people most is that the background colour is usually not specified at all. A passport requirement of "plain background, no shadows" says nothing about which plain colour. Light blue and grey became conventional for a practical reason: photograph someone in a white shirt against white and the outline of their shoulders disappears. The gently brightened gradient backgrounds favoured by studios work in the opposite direction, adding a sense of depth, but they sit awkwardly against a rule that forbids shadows, which is why they are a poor fit for official documents.
This tool can swap the background because a machine learning model running in the browser (Google's MediaPipe, licensed Apache-2.0) decides pixel by pixel what is you and what is behind you. What once required either a green screen or an hour of manual masking in an image editor now takes a few hundred milliseconds on a camera frame. It still cannot resolve every individual hair, which is why the old-fashioned trick of standing in front of a plain wall continues to make the biggest difference to the result.