Should I use manual color swap or AI background removal?
If the background is already clean (a solid-color photo booth shot, say), manual color swap is fine — it’s instant and downloads nothing. For an everyday snapshot — a real room wall with uneven lighting, texture, or clothing colors close to the wall — manual swap will most likely eat into the clothing or skin along with the background (connectivity-based color matching can’t tell “the background’s own natural variation” apart from “leaked into the subject”; we verified this on a real photo). That’s when AI background removal is the one to reach for — it uses an actual portrait-segmentation model instead of judging by color, so it handles that kind of messy, real-world background.
Does the AI background removal model send my photo anywhere?
No. Once the model is downloaded, recognition runs entirely inside your own browser — the photo itself is never uploaded. Worth separating two things: the “model” and the “photo”. The first time you use it, your browser downloads a roughly 44MB model file from Hugging Face (an open model-hosting platform) — that one step is a real network request, but what's transferred is our pre-built generic model weights, containing none of your photo's content. After that, your browser caches the file, so later uses don't re-download it, and it keeps working offline.
Why is there a “compress to a target size” option — isn’t a regular compressor enough?
ID photos have a specific pain point most compressors don’t address: plenty of older government or school application systems enforce a hard size cap on uploaded photos — 200KB is common, and some go as low as 30KB. A regular compressor gives you a quality slider, not “hit this exact KB target”, leaving you to guess and retry. This tool runs a binary search internally: enter the KB limit your system requires, and it finds the highest quality that still lands under it.
What does 300dpi mean, and why not just export at the size shown on screen?
DPI (pixels per inch) determines whether a printed copy of the photo comes out sharp — an image that looks fine on screen can turn out blurry once printed if the resolution wasn’t high enough for that. 300dpi is the standard most photo print shops work to, so the pixel dimensions this tool exports (a 1-inch photo comes out at 295×413px, for example) are derived from that standard rather than picked arbitrarily — the output is print-ready and works for essentially every application system’s upload requirement.
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No. Cropping, background swap, and compression all happen inside your own browser — the photo never leaves your device.