About PhotoID

PhotoID is built and operated by Samji ICT, a sole proprietorship in the Republic of Korea.

What we make

PhotoID is a mobile app that turns one selfie into a photo that meets a country’s published passport or visa specification. It detects your face, crops to the required dimensions and head position, replaces the background with the required colour, and exports either a single file for an online form or a 4×6 inch sheet laid out with cut marks for a print shop.

This website is the other half of the same work. It publishes the specifications themselves, because that information is genuinely useful whether or not you ever install anything.

How the specification data is sourced

Every measurement on this site comes from an issuing authority’s own published page or document: a passport office, a foreign ministry, a visa service, a national printing authority. Each one is recorded with its source URL and the date a person last checked it, and both are shown on the page.

• We do not use photo vendors, visa agencies, aggregator sites or blogs as sources, however confident they sound.
• Where an authority does not publish a value, we record nothing and show a dash. We never estimate a measurement to fill a gap.
• Where an authority publishes something unusual — a size range, a landmark measured differently, a rule that varies by consulate — we say so on the page rather than flattening it into a single tidy number.
• Where one figure is missing but the rest are sourced, we publish the page and mark exactly which figure we could not confirm. Four specifications are in that state today.

The app is built from the same dataset, and it only offers a specification once every figure the crop depends on has been confirmed. That is why the app supports fewer documents than this site publishes: an unconfirmed head-height ratio is a page we can honestly publish, but not a photo we can honestly generate.

Why this exists

A studio sitting for passport photos costs $15–20 in most countries and produces prints you often cannot use online. Meanwhile the requirements themselves are scattered across government pages that are hard to find, sometimes contradictory between a country’s own departments, and rarely explained. Both problems are solvable with a phone and a carefully maintained dataset.

How it is funded

The app is free. Every export is full resolution with no watermark, there is no subscription, and there is no way to pay us from inside it. It carries advertising — a banner while you work and a full-screen advert after every third export — and that is the whole business model at the moment.

This site carries no advertising at all. There is no charge for reading a specification and there never will be — putting the measurements behind a download would defeat the point of publishing them.

Corrections

If a specification here disagrees with what an authority currently publishes, we want to know. Email samji.ict@gmail.com with the country and the source, and we will check it and update the page. See also our terms and privacy policy.