How to create ID cards online

A practical walkthrough for issuing cards to a whole school, office or event — from preparing the spreadsheet to downloading files your printer can use. Allow about twenty minutes for your first batch; later batches take a fraction of that because the template is already set up.

Step 1 — Sign in with Google

Sign in with a Google account. Your workspace is created on first sign-in with 10 free ID cards, and no payment details are asked for. There is no registration form and no password to remember.

Step 2 — Prepare the roster spreadsheet

One member per row. The columns you need depend on what the card shows, but two are essential: a unique ID and the full name.

  • ID — admission number, employee code or registration number. This is what photographs are matched against, so it must be unique and must not change between the spreadsheet and the photo filenames.
  • Name — as it should be printed, in the correct case. Bulk generation prints what you give it.
  • Card fields — class and section, department and designation, blood group, parent or emergency contact, validity date, bus route. Include only what the card displays.

Sort out spelling before you upload rather than after printing. Correcting one card after a print run costs more than checking the whole sheet once.

Step 3 — Name and zip the photographs

Name each photograph after that person’s ID — 10234.jpg for the member whose ID is 10234 — and compress the folder into a single ZIP. That is what lets several hundred photographs attach themselves to the right records without anyone doing it by hand.

  • Use a consistent crop, roughly head-and-shoulders, so faces are the same size across the batch.
  • A plain, even background looks far better than a mix of classroom and outdoor shots.
  • Passport-style images at around 600 × 800 pixels or larger are plenty; anything smaller starts to soften at print size.

Step 4 — Choose and brand a template

Pick the template closest to your use, then upload your logo and authorised signature and set your colours. Confirm the card size and orientation now — changing it later reflows every field. The design options are covered in detail on ID card maker.

Step 5 — Upload and review the batch

Upload the spreadsheet and the photo ZIP together. Before generating, read the batch report. It flags the two things that waste a print run:

  • Duplicate records — the same ID twice, usually from merging two lists.
  • Missing photographs — a member in the sheet with no matching image, generally a filename that does not match the ID.

Fix those, re-upload, and only then generate.

Step 6 — Generate and download

Generating a few hundred cards takes a few minutes. When it finishes you can download a crop-marked A4 imposition PDF, a one-card-per-page PDF for a PVC card printer, or a ZIP of individual PNG files. Everything exports at roughly 800 DPI.

Print one test sheet on ordinary paper and hold it against an existing card before committing to the full run — see ID card printing.

Create your first ID cards free → 10 cards, no payment details required.