How to scan both sides of an ID card onto one page

Two routes. Most office printers have an ID card copy mode that scans both sides and lays them on one sheet for you. If yours does not, or you only have a phone, photograph each side and let a layout tool place them, then print at 100%.

The ID card tool does the layout in your browser, at 85.6 by 54 mm. ID Card Scan

The phone route, step by step

1. Lay the card on something dark and matte, out of its sleeve.
2. Photograph the front square on, with the light coming from the side rather than from behind you.
3. Turn the card over and photograph the back the same way.
4. Check the crop on each side and drag the corners if either guess is off.
5. Export one A4 page with both sides at 85.6 by 54 mm, then print it at 100% with scaling off.

Look for ID card copy on the printer first

If there is a multifunction printer in the room, try it before anything else. Most of them made in the last decade have a dedicated mode for this, usually called ID Card Copy or ID Copy, sometimes buried under a Copy Shortcuts or Special Copy menu. It scans the front, prompts you to turn the card over, scans the back, and prints both on one sheet.

That mode exists because the obvious approach does not work. Without it people copy the front, put the same sheet back in the tray, and copy the back on top. The second pass almost never lines up with the first, and the two impressions come out at slightly different positions on the page. Printer support forums are full of that exact question, which is a good sign that the button is worth finding.

What goes wrong when there is no ID mode

Three things, in order of how often they are the reason a copy comes back.

Scaling. A copier set to fit to page enlarges the card to fill the glass, so the copy comes out close to twice life size. Set it to 100% or actual size instead. This is the single most common reason an office refuses a copy.

The open lid. Copying a small card with the lid up gives a black page around it, uses a lot of toner and makes the card harder to read. Lay a sheet of white paper over the card before you close the lid.

Placement. A card pushed into the corner of the glass often loses an edge, because the scannable area usually starts a few millimetres in. Move it clear of the corner mark.

The phone route, and why it is often better

A phone camera is higher resolution than most office scanners, and it is the only option if the printer has no ID mode or you are not in the office. The catch is geometry: a photograph taken at an angle produces a trapezium rather than a rectangle, and a copy of a card that is not rectangular looks wrong even when every detail is readable.

That is the part worth automating. Detecting the corners of the card and flattening it back to a rectangle is arithmetic, and it is what the tool on this site does, in the browser, without the photograph going anywhere.

Print it at the right size, or the rest was wasted

An ID-1 card is 85.6 by 54 mm, which is 8.56 by 5.4 cm or 3.37 by 2.13 inches. A copy printed at 100% measures the same as the card in your hand, and that is what somebody comparing the two is checking.

Almost every print dialog scales by default. Look for actual size, 100%, or no scaling, and switch off fit to page. It is the same trap as the copier, one step later.

When a card is not ID-1

Most things people copy are: a bank card, a driving licence in the UK and across the EU, a national identity card, a passport card. A passport itself is not. Its data page is ID-3, 125 by 88 mm, a booklet page rather than a card, so it does not belong in a card frame at any scale. Scan it flat as an ordinary page instead, with the two machine readable lines at the bottom fully visible.

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