Center Your Face in the Photo
Upload a passport or ID photo and get a visual overlay showing whether your face is horizontally centred — with a bounding box, centre crosshair, and centering score. Also checks head tilt.
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Drop your photo here to check centering
A straight-on photo with your whole head in frame · JPG or PNG
“Face is tilted” or “Position your face in the center”: what the form means
These messages come from the form's own photo check. Tilted means your eyes are not level, because your head leans to one side. Not centred means your face sits to one side of the frame or circle instead of in the middle.
- Hold the phone straight, at eye level, and keep your head upright with both eyes level.
- Move closer until your face fills the frame or circle the form draws, with your whole head inside it.
- Face a window or a plain light wall so the light falls evenly on both sides of your face.
- For a photo you already have, check it here, re-crop it in your phone's photo editor so your face sits in the middle, then run the check here again.
How to interpret the centering overlay
The overlay compares the detected face with the middle of the image. A small horizontal offset is useful as a preparation warning, but it is not an acceptance decision: authorities can assess pose, expression, lighting and identity details that a geometric check cannot judge.
Use the original camera file where possible. A screenshot, heavily compressed image or crop that cuts into the hair can make landmark detection less reliable. If the box is clearly misplaced, retake the photo against an uncluttered background before relying on the score.
Centring is only one of several geometric rules, and it is rarely the one that causes a rejection on its own. Most published specifications care more about head height — the distance from chin to crown as a proportion of the frame — and about the eye line sitting within a band measured from the bottom edge. A photo can be perfectly centred and still fail because the head fills too little of the frame, which usually happens when the original was taken from too far away and then cropped.
Treat the overlay as a preparation aid rather than a verdict. It reports what it can measure from landmarks in your image; it cannot see whether the lighting flattens your features, whether the expression is neutral enough, or whether the background shade matches the one your authority publishes. A photo that scores well here can still be returned, and a photo that scores slightly off-centre may still sit inside the tolerance the published rule allows.
One practical habit removes most centring problems before they start: stand further back than feels natural and crop afterwards. Phone cameras held at arm's length distort features and encourage a tilted, off-centre frame, while a photo taken from two metres away on a level camera leaves room to crop precisely to the head-height band your document asks for.
- Keep the camera level with the eyes rather than pointing up or down.
- Leave visible space around the crown and both shoulders before cropping.
- Compare the result with the current authority instructions for your document.