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School ID card maker
Portrait student cards with a photo, a grade and a student number, made on your own machine.
No signup. No watermark. Your data never leaves your browser.
About the school id card maker
A student card has three jobs: match a face to a name, carry a number the office can look up, and survive a school bag until July. The first two are design decisions and take an afternoon. The third is about what you print on, and it is where most home-made student cards fail by half term.
The card is CR80 portrait, 54 × 85.6 mm, so it hangs the right way up on a lanyard and fits the same holders as everything else in the building. Import the year group from a CSV export and the names, grades and student numbers fill themselves in. The photos are attached per student.
Photographs of children are the sensitive part, so it matters that all of this happens in the browser. Nothing you add is uploaded, no photo is sent to a server, and the file you print is generated on the machine you are sitting at.
Your badge data stays in your browser. Names, spreadsheets and photos are never uploaded, and never reach any analytics. Your work is saved on this device only.
Start here
Templates for this
Each one opens in the editor with the fields already set up. Change anything you like.
What goes on a student ID card
- Photo
{{photo}} - Head and shoulders against a plain wall. Shoot the whole year group in one session in the same spot, or the set looks like it was assembled out of lost property.
- Name
{{name}} - The name on the register, not a nickname. Set it to fit, because every class of thirty contains one name twice the length of the others.
- Student number
{{student_id}} - What the office searches on. Put it in the same fixed position on every card so a member of staff can find it without turning the card over or thinking about it.
- Grade
{{grade}} - The year or grade, not the form tutor’s name — tutors change mid-year and the card does not. It is also the field that quietly dates the card.
- Valid until
{{expires}} - The end of the school year. Without a date, a card is still convincing eighteen months after the student left, which is exactly the situation an ID is supposed to prevent.
Anything in double braces is filled in per person. Put {{name}} on the badge once and it becomes every name on your list.
How it works
Four steps, and none of them is signing up.
- 1
Photograph the year group in one sitting
Same wall, same distance, same light. Rename each file with the student number as you go, because matching 180 photos to 180 names afterwards is the job that eats a whole afternoon.
- 2
Import the register
Export names, student numbers and grades from your school system as CSV and import it. The column mapping is guessed from the headers, and up to 5,000 rows go in at once.
- 3
Attach the photos and check every one
Add the photo per student and step through the list on the canvas. Checking each face against the name here takes ten minutes and saves a reprint you would otherwise pay for twice.
- 4
Print, then laminate
Print at 100% onto 250–300 gsm card, cut, and either laminate or drop each card into a rigid holder. An unlaminated card is unreadable in a fortnight.
Photographing a year group, privacy, and making the card last
Do the photography in one session. One wall, one chair, one camera position, one light source — a window on an overcast day beats a flash every time. Ask each student to hold a card with their number on it for the first frame, or rename the file as you shoot. The thing that goes wrong at scale is never the photograph, it is knowing whose it is three days later.
Crop to head and shoulders with the eyes about two thirds up the frame, and crop everyone the same way. A set of cards where one photo is a tight face and the next is a full torso reads as sloppy, and more practically it makes the cards slower for staff to check.
On privacy: a photograph of a child is personal data, and it should not be passing through anybody’s server on its way onto a card. It does not here. The photos and the CSV are read by your browser, stay on that computer, and the PDF is generated there. Keep the source images in whatever folder your school already treats as confidential, and delete the working copies once the cards are printed.
On durability: a school bag destroys paper. Print onto 250–300 gsm card, laminate with 125 micron pouches or use rigid holders, and round the corners — a square corner is the first thing to bend and then peel. Reprint the whole year group each September rather than replacing cards one at a time, and print the school year on the card so last year’s are obviously last year’s.
- CR80 portrait, 54 × 85.6 mm, so the card hangs the right way up
- One photo session, one background, one crop for everybody
- 250–300 gsm card, laminated or in a rigid holder, corners rounded
- The school year printed on the card, and a whole-batch reprint each September
Student card sizes
| Badge | Size | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| CR80 portrait | 2.13 × 3.37 in · 54 × 85.6 mm | The usual student card. Hangs the right way up on a lanyard. |
| CR80 landscape | 3.37 × 2.13 in · 85.6 × 54 mm | The same card rotated, for older students who keep it in a wallet. |
| Large student badge | 3 × 4 in · 76.2 × 101.6 mm | Younger classes, trips and visits, where staff need to read a name from a distance. |
| Stick-on tag | 3 × 2 in · 76.2 × 50.8 mm | Open days and school trips. 10 per US Letter sheet, worn once and binned. |
If the card has to work with a library scanner or a door reader you already own, match the size those were set up for before you design anything.
Questions
Where to next
- Employee ID card makerThe staff version of the same card, with a department.
- How to make ID cardsCard sizes, photo cropping, and what to print them on.
- Visitor badge makerPasses for parents and contractors at the school office.
- How to import a CSV for name badgesGetting the register out of your school system and into the editor.
Make your school id card now
The editor opens straight away. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.