Official photos live or die on two things: the exact physical size, and how the head sits inside it. This maker handles both with arithmetic instead of eyeballing. Pick the US 2 × 2 inch size or the 35 × 45 mm size used across Europe, the UK and India, frame your face with three sliders, and download a pixel-exact photo at 300 DPI — plus a 4 × 6 inch sheet tiled with copies, ready for the cheapest print in the shop. Your photo is processed entirely on your device; a portrait of you is exactly the kind of file that should never be uploaded to a stranger's server, and here it is not.
The sizes, in exact pixels
Print work is specified in millimetres and inches but produced in pixels, and the exchange rate is the resolution: at the standard 300 DPI, the US photo (2 × 2 in) is exactly 600 × 600 px, and the 35 × 45 mm photo is 413 × 531 px (35 mm is 1.378 in, × 300 = 413; 45 mm is 1.772 in, × 300 = 531). The single-photo download is precisely those dimensions, so any print service that respects the file's size prints it at the correct physical size — and a sheet printed at 100% needs no scaling decisions at the counter. The 4 × 6 sheet (1800 × 1200 px) tiles the photo edge to edge: 6 copies of the US size, 8 copies of the 35 × 45 — print one sheet, cut along the edges, and keep the spares, because every agency, employer and school seems to want the same photo at a different moment.
Framing the head
Your photo is first cover-fitted to the frame's shape — scaled until it fills it, centred — and the sliders take it from there. Zoom tightens or loosens the crop; the two shift sliders move the picture within the frame when the face is off-centre in the original. The preview draws dashed guide lines at the conventional head zone — top of head near the upper line, chin near the lower — as a hint only: authorities specify the head's height as a share of the photo (roughly 50–69% for US passports, for example), and the guides approximate that zone. They are not drawn on your download. Check the current official specification for your document before submitting: sizes in this tool are exact, but background colour, head covering, glasses, expression and recency rules are set by the issuing authority and change over time, and this page does not certify compliance with them.
Starting photo that works
Stand facing the camera, evenly lit, against a plain light background, with space around the head and shoulders — the framing sliders can rescue a lot, but they cannot invent background that the original cropped away, and zooming hard into a small photo softens it below what an examiner accepts. A recent phone photo at full resolution, taken by someone else at arm's length rather than as a selfie, is the ideal input: no wide-angle nose, no arm in frame, plenty of pixels to crop from.
Worked example
Use the sample photo (a landscape scene — a stand-in, so expect an odd crop) with the US preset: the single download is exactly 600 × 600 px and the 4×6 sheet holds 6 copies in a 3 × 2 grid. Switch the preset to 35 × 45 mm and both change together — the photo becomes 413 × 531 px and the sheet now tiles 8 copies in a 4 × 2 grid. With a real portrait, the zoom and shift sliders are what you use to land the head between the guide lines.
How to use this tool
- Drop in a front-facing portrait with space around the head (the sample is only a stand-in for testing).
- Choose the preset: US 2 × 2 in, or 35 × 45 mm for EU / UK / India documents.
- Zoom and shift until the head sits between the dashed guide lines — guides are a hint; check your authority's current rules.
- Download the single photo for digital submission, at its exact pixel size.
- …or download the 4×6 sheet, print it at 100% size, and cut the copies along their edges.
Printing without ruining the size
More correct photos are ruined at the printer than at the camera. Print the sheet at 100% / actual size with every “fit to page”, “fill page” and borderless-scaling option off — those settings quietly stretch the page by a few percent, which is the difference between 51 mm and a rejection. Photo paper and a colour print beat office paper for anything official. After printing, measure one photo with a ruler before cutting the rest: 51 × 51 mm (US) or 35 × 45 mm (EU/UK/India). If the measurement is off, the print scaling was on — fix that, not the file, because the file's pixels are exact.