Printing passport photos: at home, or from a photo print service

How many fit on a sheet

Two 2 × 2 inch photos fit on a 4 × 6 inch sheet once you leave room for the margin a home printer cannot print into. A lab that prints borderless fits six, which is why drugstore passport prints come back as a full sheet you cut up.

Smaller sizes fit more: six 35 × 45 mm photos go on the same 4 × 6 sheet. The arrangement turns the sheet sideways automatically when that fits more photos.

At home: print at actual size

1. Load matte or glossy photo paper. A passport photo on plain office paper is not accepted.
2. Open the sheet PDF and choose “Actual size” or 100%. Turn “Fit to page”, “Scale to fit” and borderless off — each of them quietly resizes the photo.
3. Print one test page on plain paper first and measure a photo with a ruler: it must be 2 inches on both sides.
4. Cut along the light guides with a craft knife and a straight edge. Scissors wander, and a crooked crop is a rejected photo.

At a photo print service: send the JPG, not the PDF

Kiosks and print apps take images. A PDF goes through their document printing instead, which lands on plain paper at the wrong size — the single most common reason a print run comes back useless.

Export the sheet as JPG instead: it is the same layout at 300 dpi, sized to the paper, so the service prints it as one photo and you cut it up. Choose the paper size that matches the sheet (4 × 6 inch), and print without cropping or “fit”.

Doing it in ToolMelo

The sheet is assembled in your browser; the photo is not uploaded. What a print service does with the file you hand it is between you and them.

1. Make the photo in the ID Photo Maker and pick the print size and paper.
2. For a printer at home, export the sheet PDF. For a kiosk or a lab, export the sheet JPG.
3. Both say how many photos the sheet holds before you export, so you can change the paper if you want more.