India OCI Card Photo Maker — Free, Fast & Private
Read the OCI photograph specification before you use this page, because it is stricter than most on one point that home photographs get wrong. The FAQ at ociservices.gov.in calls for a square photograph of not less than 51 by 51 millimetres, showing head and shoulders without a border, with what it calls 80 per cent coverage of face, uploaded as JPEG at no more than 200 kilobytes and between 200 by 200 and 900 by 900 pixels. That coverage figure is the FAQ's own phrase and it never says how it is measured, but the photo specification the same service publishes does give a rule you can hold a ruler against: the head, from the top of the hair to the bottom of the chin, must be 1 inch to 1 3/8 inches, which is 25 to 35 millimetres inside a 51 millimetre square. This page targets 50 to 68 per cent of the frame, or 25.5 to 34.7 millimetres, which sits inside that rule at both ends. It also calls for a plain light colour background and says, in brackets, not white. MiniPx composes this document onto a plain light grey for that reason, and if you are printing elsewhere, any light, even colour other than white satisfies their wording. The accompanying photo specification PDF adds that the head must face the camera directly without tilt or turn, that tinted and dark glasses are excluded and glare should be dealt with by a slight tilt of the head, and that head coverings are permitted only for religious reasons provided the face is clear from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead with both edges visible.
The India OCI Card photo is square, 2×2 in, or 600×600 px at 300 DPI. A square frame has no long axis to trade headroom against, so Ministry of Home Affairs pins the head to 50–68% of the side and the eye line to 56–69% up from the bottom, over light grey.
Square 2×2 inch photo on a plain light-coloured background (the OCI FAQ says not white). Full face front view. Glasses must be clear (no tint). For Overseas Citizen of India and PIO applications.
Squareness defeats people who start from a rectangle. To keep a whole head inside a square you end up with dead margin at either side; to fill the width you take the top of the skull off. Work from the original photograph. Children are the other thing worth knowing about here, because the rules bend for them and most sources do not mention it: the OCI photo specification relaxes face height and eye position for children under ten, and says babies under one do not have to have their eyes open. Sizing is looser than this page implies as well. Where we export a single 600 by 600 pixel file, OCI Services accepts anything from 200 by 200 to 900 by 900, and states a 200 kilobyte ceiling with no minimum, so a small file is not automatically a problem.
MiniPx composes the cutout onto #E8E8E8 rather than white and encodes 600×600 JPEG in this tab. Figures come from Ministry of Home Affairs — ociservices.gov.in. If one has gone stale, contact@minipx.com.