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

Most multifunction printers already have a mode for this, and it is usually buried one level down under a name you would never guess: 2in1(ID) on Brother, ID card copy on Canon, ID Card Copy on Epson, 2-sided ID Scan on office HP machines. It scans the front, asks you to turn the card over, scans the back, and prints or saves both faces on one sheet at their real size. If your machine does not have it, photographing the card and laying the two shots on a single A4 page takes about the same time.

What the office asking for it actually wants

Worth a moment before you press anything, because it changes which route you take. A car hire desk, a bank onboarding form or an HR file almost always wants one sheet — or one page in a PDF — showing both faces, legible, at something close to real size. A two-page file where page one is the front and page two is the back is a different thing, and some portals reject it outright because their reviewer sees only page one.

Real size matters more often than people expect. A licence number, an expiry date and a signature strip have to be readable, and a reviewer comparing your copy against the original wants the proportions right. The card modes below reproduce at 100 %; a photograph fitted to half a sheet does not, and that is the honest difference between the two routes.

Brother prints the caveat in its own manual, and it is a fair one to repeat: you may copy an identification card only to the extent your local law permits. Rules on copying passports, driving licences and national ID cards differ from country to country, and the printer will not tell you which apply to you.

The card mode, make by make

Every manufacturer built this feature and every one of them named it differently. These are the paths as the manuals give them.

• Brother. Place the card face down in the upper-left corner of the glass, at least 3 mm (0.12 in) clear of the top and left edges. Press Copy / Scan Options, choose Layout(2in1 ID) — on some panels it reads Page Layout — then 2in1 ID Vert. or 2in1 ID Horiz. Press Start to take the front, turn the card over, press the arrow key to take the back. Paper must be set to A4 or Letter, and the copy keeps the card's original size.
• Canon PIXMA and other inkjets. Press Copy, then the Menu button, choose Special copy → ID card copy, and confirm the page size and media type. Lay the card front down with 2 mm (0.12 in) or more between it and the edges of the platen, press OK, then turn it over and press OK again. Some page sizes and media types are not offered in this mode.
• Canon office machines. The same feature appears on imageRUNNER-class panels as Copy ID Card, in the copy function list rather than under a Special heading.
• Epson. Select Copy on the home screen, open the Advanced tab, switch on ID Card Copy, and place the card face down about 5 mm from the corner mark on the glass. Follow the prompt to turn it over and start the second scan.
• HP enterprise LaserJet and PageWide. From the home screen touch Copy, then Options, and pick 2-sided ID Scan. Put the card face down in the left rear corner of the glass with the top of the card along the left edge — the panel draws the orientation for you. Touch Scan, turn the card over when prompted, touch Scan again, then Done and Copy.
• HP home printers. Less consistent. A few models carry an ID card item on the front panel; many do not, and the HP Smart app's Scan → Add Pages route gives you a two-page PDF rather than two faces on one sheet. If you cannot find the mode on the panel itself, treat the machine as not having it and use the phone route below.

No card mode: photograph it and build the page yourself

This is the route for a printer without the feature, for a scanner-less household, and for the fairly common case of needing the copy at ten at night with only a phone to hand.

Photograph the front and the back as two separate shots. Lay the card on a dark, plain surface, keep the phone parallel to it rather than tilted, and let daylight or a lamp bounced off a wall do the work — a direct flash puts a white blind spot across the hologram and the photo number. Fill the frame with the card and check all four corners are inside it before you move on.

Then open JPG to PDF, add the front shot and the back shot in that order, and set Page size to 2 per A4 sheet. The two images land on one portrait A4 page, one above the other, in the order shown in the list. Set Margins to Small unless you know the recipient prints borderless.

A little arithmetic on what that gives you, because it explains the one compromise. The sheet is 595 × 842 points; with small margins each half is roughly 555 × 391 points, or 196 × 138 mm. Your photograph is fitted into that box whole, so a shot that is mostly card comes out around twice the size of the real thing. For an office that wants both faces legible on one sheet, that is fine and arguably better. For a submission that demands an actual-size copy, use a printer with a card mode instead — that is the one thing the phone route cannot do.

The images go into the page as they are, with no second compression pass, so nothing that was sharp in the photo turns soft in the PDF. Rotating a shot inside the tool is the exception: that redraws it as a JPEG at 92 % quality, which is invisible on a card but worth knowing about.

Making the result actually legible

Whichever route produced the page, the same three faults account for most rejected copies.

Glare across the important line. Cards are laminated, and lamination reflects. On the glass this shows up as a bright band where the lid pressed unevenly; from a phone it is the flash or a bare bulb. Move the light rather than the card, and check the number strip and the expiry date on screen before you send anything.

Too much desk, not enough card. Photographed from too far away, the card occupies a third of the frame and half your resolution goes to the table. If the finished page has wide empty borders, Crop PDF trims all of them with four sliders and a live preview, which also takes weight off the file.

A picture instead of a document. Send a PDF, not two loose photos. One file arrives in one piece, in a fixed order, and reads as paperwork to whoever opens it; the general habits that make phone copies acceptable are collected in scanning documents with your phone.

Getting it through the upload form

Two limits break card copies far more often than image quality does.

File size. Two phone photographs at twelve megapixels make a PDF of four to ten megabytes, and plenty of government and bank portals stop at two. Compress PDF fixes it in one pass; check the page after compressing rather than before, because the small print on a card is exactly what a hard compression setting eats first.

Page count and format. If the form says «one page», a two-page file will be bounced by a validator that never looks at the content. If it says «PDF or JPG», send the PDF: it holds the two faces in one place. And if the copy comes back rejected for being upside down after you turned the card on the glass, the page rotation rather than the image is the thing to fix — fixing an upside-down PDF explains why the two are not the same.

One habit worth keeping: give the file a name the recipient can file, like licence-front-back.pdf. It costs three seconds and it is the difference between a document and IMG_4471.pdf.

Common questions

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