Photo guidelines

CardOffice checks every photo automatically and then shows it to a person. This page explains what both are looking for — useful whether you are taking the photo or reviewing it.

The short version

A good ID photo looks like a passport photo: head and shoulders, facing the camera, evenly lit, plain background, in focus.

The requirements

	Requirement	Why
Size	At least 600 × 800 pixels	Below this, the face is visibly soft at 300 dpi
Shape	Portrait, not landscape	Cards use a 35 × 45 mm photo area
Format	JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC	What phones and cameras produce
File size	Up to 15 MB	Larger files are almost always screenshots of screenshots
Face	Head fills 50–85% of the frame height	Any smaller and the face is unrecognisable on a card
Background	Plain and light	A busy background makes the face hard to pick out
Lighting	Even, no harsh shadows	Shadows across the face defeat visual identification
Focus	Sharp	Motion blur cannot be recovered
Expression	Neutral, eyes open, mouth closed	Standard for identity documents
Head coverings	Only for religious reasons, face visible	Consistent with passport rules

What the automated checks measure

Each photo gets a score out of 100. It is a triage aid, not a verdict — a person still approves or rejects every photo unless your organisation has explicitly turned that off.

Check	What it looks at	Weight
Resolution	Pixel dimensions against the minimum	18
Focus	Edge sharpness (variance of the Laplacian)	18
Orientation	Aspect ratio — portrait vs landscape	16
Lighting	Average brightness	16
Background	Variation across the outer border	12
Face	Skin-tone region size and position	10
Contrast	Tonal range	4
Colour	Colour cast, and whether it’s greyscale	3
Centring	Horizontal offset of the face	3

Each check comes back as pass, warning or fail. Anything with a fail stays in the review queue no matter what its score is — a hard failure is never auto-approved.

What this is and isn’t. These are image-statistics checks modelled on the ICAO 9303 portrait requirements. There is no trained face-recognition model here, and this is not certified biometric conformance testing. It reliably catches the failures that waste cards — dark rooms, sideways phones, blurry snaps, cluttered backgrounds — and leaves judgement to a person.

Reviewing photos

Open Photo review in the sidebar. Photos are oldest-first by default, which is the order people are waiting in.

Each card shows the photo, the score, and any checks that did not pass. That is usually enough to decide without opening anything.

Keyboard shortcuts

Reviewing 200 photos with a mouse is miserable. Use these instead:

Key	Does
A	Approve the focused photo
R	Reject it (opens the reason box)
Space	Add it to the selection
→ or J	Next photo
← or K	Previous photo
?	Show this list

Select several with Space, then use Approve n to clear a batch at once.

Writing a rejection reason

The reason is emailed to the person, so write it as an instruction they can follow:

• ✅ “The photo is too dark. Please retake it facing a window.”
• ❌ “Poor quality.”

There are one-tap presets for the common cases.

Duplicate detection

Every photo gets a perceptual hash. If the same face is submitted under two different identities, the review screen flags it — the hash survives resizing, recompression and small crops, which a checksum does not.

Photos and privacy

• Original uploads are kept unmodified, so a bad crop can always be redone without asking someone to photograph themselves again.
• Rejected photos are deleted after 90 days by default.
• Superseded photos are deleted after 5 years by default.
• The photo on someone’s current card is never automatically deleted.
• Both retention periods are configurable per organisation in Settings → Photos.

Tips for taking photos at a counter

If you photograph people at a service desk:

• Put a plain light-grey or white backdrop behind the chair
• Use a lamp either side, or one large soft light in front — never overhead alone, which puts shadows in the eye sockets
• Mark the floor where people should stand, so framing is consistent
• Hold the camera at eye height, not above; looking down distorts faces
• Take two and keep the better one — it costs nothing