About and method
Passport Sorted checks passport and visa photos against the official rules and crops them to the exact size. It covers 27 documents from 20 countries and the Schengen area.
Where the rules come from
Every number comes from the issuing government's own photo page or PDF, or an official consulate page. Each document page links to its source and gives the date we checked it. Where a government site blocks automated readers, we read an archived copy of the official page and say so. Documents we couldn't verify from an official source aren't published. The full set is open data.
How the check works
Your browser runs two open-source models from Google's MediaPipe (Apache 2.0): a face landmark model that finds 478 points on your face, and a person segmentation model that separates you from the background. From those we measure:
- Head height from chin to the top of the head, and where the eyes sit.
- Tilt and turn of the head.
- Whether the eyes are open and the mouth closed, and whether you are smiling.
- Background brightness, colour and how uniform it is.
- Face exposure, left-right lighting balance and focus.
- Whether there are enough pixels for the document at 300 or 600 dpi.
The top of the head is estimated from the face shape and the hair edge. It is accurate to a few per cent on a normal photo, which is inside the tolerance of every spec we hold, but it can be off with very voluminous hair or a head covering.
What we do and don't do to your photo
We rotate it level, crop it and resize it. We don't retouch faces, remove shadows, change backgrounds or generate anything. Most offices refuse edited photos, so a photo that fails the background or lighting check needs to be retaken.
Documents we only check
Some documents don't allow anyone else to crop the photo, or require a commercial photographer or an approved booth: UK passports, Canadian passports, French passports and ID cards, and Taiwanese passports. For those, the check is free and we don't sell a file.
Limits
A passing check is not an approval. Only the issuing office decides. If a photo you bought from us is rejected, you get a free re-render or a refund; see the guarantee.