How we check

A checker is only worth using if you can see its working. This page documents the measurement method, where every rule comes from, and — just as plainly — what the method cannot do.

We measure, we don’t certify. IDPhotoCheck checks your photo against the published measurements — the issuing authority makes the final decision, and no tool can promise approval.

The pipeline

On your device. Your photo is decoded and analysed in your browser. Automatic measurement — served from this site itself, never from a third-party cloud — locates the chin, hairline, eye centres, nose and face edges. Nothing is uploaded, ever.
Geometry. From those points: head height (chin to estimated crown), head width, eye line, face centring, head roll, and turn/tilt proxies — each expressed as a percentage of the frame.
Pixels. The edges of the frame are sampled for background mean colour, uniformity and corner disagreement (the shadow signature); a centre-region sharpness proxy is computed for guidance.
File facts. Pixel dimensions, format and byte size are read exactly — no estimation anywhere in the file rules.
Verdicts. Each measurement meets the published band for your document: pass, borderline (“check”), or fail.

The crown problem — and the borderline band

The measured points end at the hairline; none of them sits on the crown of the head, and hairstyles move the true crown further. Every head-height figure therefore carries an estimate. Instead of hiding that, verdicts carry a borderline band: a measurement comfortably inside the published range passes; clearly outside fails; near an edge, the result says “borderline — check”, with the number shown. A confident wrong answer is the worst thing a checker can produce, so this one is built not to.

Where the rules come from

Every rule table on this site names its publisher, document and the date it was checked (last full verification: 8 November 2026). The sources are the authorities themselves: the U.S. Department of State, GOV.UK, France-Visas and the EU Visa Code framework, the Government of India’s e-Visa portal, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs photo sheet via the Visa Application Service Centers. Values are never copied from competing photo tools.

And when a source can’t be verified

Then the site says so, on the page, and ships the document in manual mode — currently the India passport, whose official values we could not read from an official page at verification time while third-party sites publish contradictions. You enter the values from your own instructions; the tool measures against yours. The full story is on the India page.

What the checker cannot do

It cannot certify or guarantee acceptance — only the issuing authority decides, sometimes on factors no pixel analysis sees.
It cannot judge recency (was this taken within 6 months?), expression nuance, or whether a head covering meets an exception — those stay human judgements.
It cannot fix an under-resolution photo or a painted background, and it will not try: both “fixes” would make the photo less compliant, not more.
Baby eye-open readings and support visibility are advisory/human-confirmed by design, because that is what the official rules themselves require.

Privacy, briefly

Photos never leave your device; there is no upload endpoint to send them to. Everything the measurement needs is served from this site itself, and the measurement itself makes no third-party calls. Separate anonymous usage statistics are covered in the privacy policy — they never include photos or measurements. Details: privacy policy.