Passport Photo Maker is heading to Google Play. It turns your phone into a compliant passport-photo booth for more than 20 countries: a live coach frames the shot, seven checks grade it against the official spec, and you walk away with a print-ready file. The part that took the most work is the part you never see: none of it leaves the device.
Most "passport photo" apps upload your face to a server, run the crop in the cloud, and ask you to trust a privacy policy. That is a strange thing to do with a government-ID photo. We did the opposite and made on-device the whole product, not a footnote.
What ships in the first version
- A live framing coach that lines up your eyes, head size and crop in real time. The shutter only turns green when the frame fits the spec.
- Seven compliance checks against the actual country requirement: print size, head height, eye line, background, expression and more, each explained in plain language.
- 20+ countries for passport, visa and ID, with each spec showing its official source and the date it was last verified.
- A privacy report that shows "0 bytes uploaded" after every session, because it is true.
- Export to a clean file, or a 4x6 inch (10x15 cm) sheet tiled at exact size to print and cut at any photo lab.
- One-time unlock, no subscription. Re-take and re-export as many times as you need.
The decision that shaped everything: assess, don't edit
Government photo rules forbid edited faces. So the app never reshapes, smooths or swaps the background. It frames, sizes and assesses, and then it is honest about what passes and what does not. That single constraint killed a lot of tempting features (background replacement, beautify, "auto-fix") and made the product more trustworthy for it. What you submit is honestly you.
What the build looked like
The hard parts were not the camera. They were:
- On-device measurement. Face detection, cropping and the compliance grade all run locally with Android ML Kit. Getting head-height and eye-line measurement to match how a real reviewer reads the photo took more iteration than the capture flow.
- Sourced specs. Every country requirement carries its official source and a verified date, so the numbers are auditable rather than folklore. Some document types, like visas that differ from the passport size, carry their own dimensions.
- Honest print sizing. A passport photo has to print at an exact physical size. We dropped the system print dialog (which silently scaled a 4x6 sheet up to fill A4) for a fixed 10x15 cm sheet image, so a lab print comes out dimensionally correct.
The privacy promise is the headline, but the live coach is what makes the app feel different in the hand. You stop guessing and start watching the frame lock into place.
Passport Photo Maker is rolling out on Google Play now.