Frequently asked questions

Yes. The free tier is the full manual tool: upload, crop, adjust, and check compliance against the exact published spec for your country and document, at full resolution, with no watermark, and no time limit.

It is not a trial or a teaser for the paid tier — it is meant to be genuinely usable on its own, for as long as you need it.

For most countries, paying unlocks AI-assisted automation for one photo: automatic face-and-crop detection, background removal where the destination country's rules permit it, image enhancement, and a few alternate framing variants to choose between.

You can preview the AI-assisted result before paying; the full-resolution, watermark-free download and print sheet unlock once your one-time payment is verified — the exact amount is shown at checkout before you confirm. That payment is spent when you download the photo — editing a different photo needs a new payment. The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and China work differently — see the next section.

No. It's a single one-time payment through Stripe Checkout, covering one photo — you see the exact amount on the checkout page before paying. There is nothing to cancel, because nothing recurs or renews.

No. For the free tier, and for the paid tier in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and China, your photo is processed entirely inside your browser and never reaches our servers.

The one exception is the AI enhancement step, available on the paid tier for other countries: it sends your photo to a server once, forwards it in memory to our image-processing provider, and returns the result without ever writing it to a database or disk. There is no database in this product at all.

No, never. Face-landmark detection is used only to position an initial crop guide as a convenience — the coordinates it produces exist transiently in your browser's memory and are not a stored biometric template of any kind.

Yes — that's a common and expected use. makeidpic is meant for adults preparing a photo for themselves or for a dependent in their care, such as a parent submitting a baby's or child's passport photo. It isn't designed for children to use directly as the ones operating the tool.

No, and we want to be upfront about that. We guarantee that your downloaded photo matches the specification we display for your country and document.

We cannot guarantee that the issuing authority will accept your application — that decision belongs entirely to them, based on your whole application, not just the photo.

For the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, those governments' own passport rules prohibit digitally altering an ID photo after it's taken, so we don't, even on the paid tier.

China's restriction is different: it isn't a rule about the photo itself, but an unresolved legal question about transferring images across borders to a third-party server under China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL). Until that's clearly resolved, we keep China's processing on-device only, the same as the other three.

All four countries still get precise automated sizing and cropping on the paid tier, plus a watermark-free export and print sheet — just no background removal, enhancement, or alternate framings.

Not currently. Our compliance checklist is automated, built on the same geometry and detection models used for cropping. We don't offer a paid human-review add-on today.

It's a fair question. Australia's DFAT, among other authorities, has publicly warned travelers about certain online passport-photo services and mobile apps, largely over concerns about where uploaded photos end up and who holds onto them. We think that's a reasonable concern to raise about a lot of tools in this space.

Our answer is architectural: most of makeidpic's processing happens on your device rather than a server, we don't create accounts or stored profiles, and nothing about your photo is retained after your session ends. This isn't an endorsement from DFAT or any government — always follow your own country's official guidance too.

That's outside what we do. makeidpic focuses specifically on creating and checking compliant photos for the countries and documents we support — we don't help with the rest of an application, broader visa or immigration questions, or documents beyond a photo. For those, the relevant embassy, consulate, or passport authority is the right place to ask.

If you still have the confirmation page open, or can find it again in your browser history, you can return to it to pick up where you left off.

If you've lost it entirely, contact us with your checkout receipt email and we'll help sort it out manually — we can verify your payment with Stripe even without an account system on our side.