Employee ID Card Generator Help Documentation

A complete guide to the ID card maker, from the first card to printing a whole team.

Last Updated: November 10, 2026

1. Getting Started

The page has two columns on a computer: the form on the left (People, Employee, Company, Design and Project, each folding open and shut) and the card on the right, which stays in view as you scroll. On a phone the card comes first and the form below; the "View card" button brings the card back into view.

To see how it works, press Sample above the card: a sample company and three people are filled in. Change anything and the card follows as you type.

2. The Company

Under Company: the company name, a tagline or unit, the website, phone, the address (shown on the back after "If found, please return to") and the back side text, up to 400 characters. Add the logo by dropping it on the logo box or with "Choose logo". These are shared by every card.

3. People and Their Details

Under Employee: full name, employee ID (with Auto), job title, department (with a list of common ones), email, phone, blood group, date of joining, valid until (with + validity), emergency contact and phone, and a note for the back such as the buildings the person may enter. Empty fields are left off the card.

Under People: the list of everyone. Click a name to edit that person. Add person starts a new one with the same department and valid-until date; Duplicate copies the person on show without the name, ID, email, phone and photo; Remove takes the person and their photo off the list (after asking, when the person has a name). Up to 500 people.

4. The Photo

Drop a photo on the frame, click it or "Choose photo", or paste a picture while the tool is in use (up to 25 MB). In the Adjust photo window, drag the photo or use the arrow keys to move it, and scroll, pinch, the slider or plus and minus to zoom (up to four times); Rotate turns it a quarter, Reset starts again. The frame has the card's photo shape, and what sits in it goes on the card when you press Use photo. "Adjust" opens the window again with the whole photo; "Remove" takes it off. A photo's empty corners are white.

5. Templates, Colours and Fonts

• Template: Classic, Panel, Minimal, Bold, Gradient or Wave, shown as small cards with your company name. The arrow keys move between them.
• Accent colour: ten ready colours or any colour from the colour box. Text on the coloured parts is dark or white, whichever stands out more.
• Card base: light or dark.
• Font: Sans (the site's Inter, the same on every device), Serif, Friendly or Mono (the device's own fonts).
• Photo shape: friendly (rounded corners), circle or square. Without a photo, the person's initials sit on a coloured gradient.
• Thin border: a fine line just inside the edge.

Above the card, Landscape and Portrait turn the card. Each template has its own landscape and portrait layout.

6. The Back of the Card

The back has the company name and website in a coloured band, the QR code with a line under it ("Scan to save contact", "Scan for ID" or "Scan"), the back side text (up to four lines; without your own text, a line saying the card is company property), then the emergency contact, blood group, joining date, valid until and the note, a signature line labelled "Authorised signature" (switch it off under Design), and the return address. On a landscape card the barcode sits under the QR code, and without a QR code the logo takes its place.

7. The QR Code

Under Design, "QR code content":

• Contact card (vCard): name, company and department, job title, work email, phone (the person's, or the company's when the person has none), website (with https:// added when it is missing) and a note with the ID. A phone that scans it offers to save the contact.
• Employee ID only: the ID, or the name when there is no ID.
• Custom link or text: up to 300 characters, with {id}, {name} and {email} filled in for each person; inside a web address (one starting with a scheme such as https://) they are written the way addresses need, so a space becomes %20.
• No QR code.

The code is always dark on white with a quiet zone of four squares, its error correction as strong as the size allows (level M, raised to Q or H when the code keeps its size; level L for very long text). "QR on the front too" adds a smaller copy to the front.

8. The Barcode

"Barcode: Code 128 of the ID" prints the employee ID as a Code 128 barcode with the ID written under it, on the front of every template and under the QR code on the back of a landscape card. Each bar is a whole number of pixels, the symbol has its quiet zone of ten bar widths on each side, and on a dark card or the Gradient template it sits in a white box. It holds the letters, digits, spaces and signs of an English keyboard; an ID with other characters gets no barcode, and a line under Design says so. Choose "None" to leave it off.

Under Design, a line also appears when a code comes out very small for its text (QR squares under 0.25 mm or bars under 0.15 mm on the card). Print a test card and scan it before a batch.

9. Automatic IDs and Validity

ID pattern for Auto (under Design, up to 32 characters): {yyyy} the year, {yy} its last two digits, {n:4} the next running number with 4 digits, {rand:5} five random digits from the browser's secure random numbers. The running number follows the largest number at the end of an ID already on the list, so EMP-2026-0042 is followed by EMP-2026-0043. Widths go up to 12 digits. Label for the ID (up to 24 characters) is what the card calls it: Employee ID, Student ID, Member No.

Validity period (1, 2, 3 or 5 years) is what "+ validity" adds to the joining date, or to today when there is none: the same day that many years later, and 28 February after 29 February. Date format prints dates as 31 Dec 2026, Dec 31, 2026 or 2026-12-31.

10. Importing a CSV File

Save the list from your spreadsheet as CSV and press Import CSV under People. The first row names the columns, in any order: name, id, title, department, email, phone, blood, joined, expires, emergencyName, emergencyPhone and note, or common names for them (employee name, emp id, designation, dept, mobile, blood group, date of joining, valid until, emergency contact, remarks and others). A name or id column is needed; rows with neither are skipped.

• The separator is the one the header row uses: comma, semicolon or tab. Cells holding the separator, quotes or line breaks are put in quotes, as spreadsheets do.
• Dates: 2026-03-05, 05/03/2026, 5.3.2026, 5-3-26, 5 March 2026, 5th Mar 2026, Mar 5, 2026, also with a weekday in front. Numbers are read day first unless the second one cannot be a month. Two-digit years up to 50 years ahead are this century. Dates that do not exist are left empty.
• Blood groups: A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-, also written "O+ve", "B positive" or "AB neg"; anything else is left empty.
• Texts longer than the form allows are cut to that length.

When the list holds only one empty person, the import takes its place; otherwise the people are added at the end. Up to 500 people in all and 5 MB per file.

11. The Preview

The card shows the person on show. Front and Back, a click on the card or the round button flip it. The preview is drawn the same way as the files, so what you see is what you download and print.

12. Downloading PNG and ZIP Files

• Download PNG: the side on show of the person on show.
• Both sides (ZIP): front and back of the person on show.
• Export all (under People): every person, front and back, in one ZIP.
• Copy: the side on show to the clipboard as a picture, where the browser allows it.

Export size: 300 DPI (1,011 by 638 pixels), 600 DPI (2,022 by 1,276) or 150 DPI for screens (506 by 319). Add 3 mm bleed adds 3 mm of background on every side and leaves the corners square. The PNG files carry their resolution, so they print at the card's size. File names come from the ID and the name.

13. Printing

Print puts every card on the list, front and back, on a print sheet at the real size (85.6 by 54 mm, or 91.6 by 60 mm with bleed), landscape cards two to a row on A4 and portrait cards three, with dashed lines to cut along. In the print window set the scale to 100% or "Actual size". Only the cards are printed, not the page.

14. Projects, Backup and Start Over

Everything is kept in this browser as you work: the text in the browser's storage, the photos and logo in its database. Under Project, Export project saves everything, photos included, in a file (a JSON file); Import project opens such a file, up to 80 MB, in place of the project open now. Start over removes everything this tool keeps in this browser after you confirm; the rest of the site is left alone.

15. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every button, field and switch works with the keyboard. Inside the tool, Ctrl + S downloads the side on show and Ctrl + P prints every card; elsewhere on the page the browser's own save and print stay. The templates are a group: the arrow keys, Home and End move the choice. In the photo window the arrow keys move the photo and plus and minus zoom; Esc closes a window. The card pictures are labelled for screen readers as the front and back of the ID card.

16. Privacy

The card maker works in this browser, and nothing you add is sent anywhere: no upload, no account and no server-side storage. The QR code and barcode are made on the page. A link you put in the QR code is only written into the code; the page never opens it. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, the page shows advertising and counts visits; the cookie banner explains the choices and the Privacy Policy explains both. Your names, photos and details are never part of them.

17. How It Was Checked

Before this page was published, the engine behind the cards was checked against references written from the rules on this page, with the test values made first: 129,005 cases in 14 groups. They include 6,021 dates written in many ways and 4,000 validity dates compared with an independent date library; every day from 1899 to 2101; 2,506 barcodes and 687 QR codes read back by independent readers (contact cards, IDs, links, Hindi, Gujarati, Russian and Chinese names); the QR text, ZIP files, the resolution written into the PNG files; 1,507 saved projects made to break the tool; 502 CSV files written with commas, semicolons and tabs; the ID pattern; and the text colour on 5,013 accent colours. Then every template, landscape and portrait, was downloaded at 150, 300 and 600 DPI and its QR code and barcode read back from the files, and the page was tried at four screen widths in both themes.

18. Troubleshooting

• The printed card is the wrong size. Set the scale in the print window to 100% or "Actual size", not "Fit to page".
• The barcode is missing. The ID is empty, the barcode is set to None, or the ID has characters a Code 128 barcode cannot hold (see the line under Design).
• A phone does not read the QR code. Hold the phone closer and steady, in good light; for the front code, try the larger one on the back. With much text, the squares get small: use "Employee ID only" or a shorter link.
• Copy does nothing. This browser does not let pages put pictures on the clipboard; use Download PNG.
• "This browser does not let the page keep photos between visits." The browser blocks the page's database (some private windows do). Export the project to keep your work.
• My work is gone. It is kept per browser and device; a private window or cleared browser data starts afresh. Import an exported project to bring it back.

19. Support

For questions the FAQ does not answer, use the contact form.