What the editor does
Most rejections come down to a few millimetres. The editor loads your country's preset, measures crown to chin, and draws the required head height as a box on the image while you drag the frame. Four checks then run live against the ICAO proportions: face centred, head between 50 and 69 percent of the frame height, eyes on the line, background plain. The badge reads 100 percent only when all four pass.
Where the dimensions come from
Sizes are published, not invented. Every measurement on a country page is read out of the document that publishes it, rather than out of another website that summarises it:
- ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, the machine-readable baseline most authorities inherit.
- The issuing authority's own publication. GOV.UK, the US Department of State, Passport Canada and DFAT each publish their dimensions, head-height ranges and the background colour they accept, and those pages win when a summary site disagrees.
- Embassy guidance, for visa photos that break with the passport rule and need a different crop.
- A re-read after any change. When an authority revises a page, the country guide is corrected in the next release rather than left to drift.
Countries covered
Thirty-four presets ship today, from Bangladesh at 45 × 55 mm to the United States at 2 × 2 inches and Ireland at 35 × 45 mm. Background colour is set per country where the authority names one: HMPO asks for plain light grey rather than paper white, and the US digital upload accepts white or off-white. Anything outside the presets goes in the Custom Size box.
What comes out
- PNG or JPEG, at 300 or 600 DPI. The editor defaults to 600, and the control sits above the download button for authorities that ask for 300.
- Print sheets on A4 or US Letter, tiled with an 8 mm margin and a 4 mm gap so you can cut your own copies.
- Custom dimensions. Type the millimetres yourself for a document not in the preset list.
- Guides are overlays, not pixels. The face outline, the head box and the eye line are drawn in the page and never reach the exported canvas, which the browser builds from nothing but the background colour and your photo.
How your file is handled
Cropping, background removal and export all run through the browser's own Canvas and File APIs. Two models are fetched the first time you open the editor: MediaPipe's FaceLandmarker for head position, and an imgly segmentation model for background removal. They arrive from a CDN, execute in a worker, and your image never travels with them. There is no upload endpoint on this site, and you can confirm that in your browser's network panel while you work.
What it costs to run
A booth at an airport sells the same crop a phone can produce, and the paperwork has moved the same way. UK passport applications now take a digital photo rather than a printed one, and the US Department of State rejects selfies and retouching outright. Keeping the work on the device removes the storage bill and the bandwidth from the equation, so there is nothing to recover and no plan to sell you.
Editorial standards
Country guides are written from the sources above instead of being copied from sites that summarise them, and the wording is rebuilt around the job in front of the reader. Measurements keep their units, since 2 × 2 inches and 50 × 50 mm are not the same thing. Where two authorities disagree about background colour or head height, the page says so rather than splitting the difference.
Who runs the site
A small independent team maintains PicToPassport, with no parent company behind it. No requirement page has been written to steer you toward a particular photo shop, and the editor carries no watermark, because a photo you cannot print is a photo that got rejected.
Contact
A wrong number, a rule that has changed, or a country that is missing. The the contact page goes to a shared inbox read by a person, and replies usually land within two business days.