Passport Photo Maker

Passport Photo Maker handles three jobs in one pipeline: face-aware cropping, optional AI background removal, and laying out a print sheet. Cropping uses Canvas drawImage with target ratios derived from the country's official specification (51x51 mm for US passports, 35x45 mm for UK and Schengen, 50x70 mm for Canada, 35x45 mm for India). HEIC files from iPhones are converted on-the-fly through dynamically imported heic2any so iPhone-only users do not need a separate convert step.

Background removal runs the RMBG-1.4 segmentation model from Hugging Face entirely in the browser via @huggingface/transformers and onnxruntime-web. The model weights are roughly 44 MB and are cached in IndexedDB after first use, so repeat sessions start instantly. Once the alpha mask is computed the cutout is composited onto a flat white background — the colour every major government accepts.

Country presets are baked in: US State Department (2x2 in, head 1 to 1 3/8 in tall), UK Home Office (35x45 mm, head 29-34 mm), Schengen (35x45 mm, head 32-36 mm), India (35x45 mm), and Canada (50x70 mm). Each preset enforces the right pixel dimensions at 300 dpi for print and shows a head-size guide overlay so you can position the face within the official tolerances.

The print sheet is composed in a second Canvas pass at standard print sizes — 4x6 inches (the most common drugstore print) or A4 — with multiple copies tiled at the correct spacing for cutting. A QR code generated by the qrcode library is embedded on each sheet so a user can re-open the same export on a phone for the photo shop, without uploading anything.

The accuracy of the output depends on the source. The tool does not replace specialised passport-photo studios for things like flash, glare, or shadow detection: it lays out a compliant frame and removes the background, but the source photo still needs to be reasonably lit, in focus, with the subject facing the camera. Most rejections come from harsh shadows or smiles that show teeth, not from frame measurements.

Common pitfalls are surfaced in the UI: the head-size guide turns red when the face is outside the official tolerance, the chin-to-eyes ratio is checked against country-specific rules, and a warning appears if the source is below the minimum resolution needed for a 300 dpi print at the chosen size.

Everything runs locally — the source image, the segmentation model, the heic2any decoder, the Canvas compositing, and the PDF/PNG sheet export. No image bytes are sent to a server. This matters because passport photos often capture vulnerable populations (children, asylum seekers, anyone changing identity documents), and a privacy-first pipeline avoids creating yet another photo cache.