About

Why this exists

Passport photo rejections are mostly one problem wearing different hats: the head is the wrong size. Authorities publish a narrow permitted range — often a five millimetre window on a forty-five millimetre photo — and there is no way to hit it reliably by cropping to the right outer dimensions and hoping. Meanwhile most free tools want you to upload a photograph of your face to a server you know nothing about, and most paid ones charge for a crop.

This tool does the measurement properly and does it on your own machine.

How it measures

Every specification measures head height from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head including hair. That last part is the hard part. Face-landmark models — the standard tool for finding features in a photograph — have no landmark for the top of the skull; their highest point sits around the hairline, so any estimate built from them is systematically short, and short in exactly the dimension that gets photos rejected.

So the pipeline runs in an order that might look backwards: it separates you from the background first, then reads the top of your head off the outline of your hair, and only uses the landmark model for the chin and the eye line. The background separation was needed anyway to replace the background with the required colour, so the accurate measurement comes free.

With the crown, chin and eye line known, the crop is computed to land in the middle of every permitted range rather than near an edge, which leaves the widest margin for the small errors any automatic measurement makes. If your original photograph is framed too tightly for a compliant crop to exist, the tool tells you which edge is short instead of cropping further and producing something that will fail.

Why nothing is uploaded

A passport photograph is a picture of your face attached to an identity document application. There is no good reason for it to travel to someone else's server to be cropped, and several bad ones. Face detection, background separation, cropping and JPEG encoding all run in your browser through WebAssembly. You can confirm it in the Network tab of your browser's developer tools.

How the specifications are kept honest

Each page links the official source its numbers came from and shows the date a person last read that source. A specification that has not been checked against its source does not get published at all — the build skips it — because a confidently wrong page here costs someone a rejected application. There are currently 5 verified specifications on the site.

If you spot a number that no longer matches the official page, that is the most useful thing you can tell us.

How it is paid for

Advertising covers hosting. The tool itself is free, has no account, no usage limit and no paid tier, and advertisers receive nothing about you from us beyond what Google's own advertising systems collect. They never receive your photograph, because we never have a copy of it.