Photo studio terms

You pay per person. Unlocking a person gives you their finished 600 × 600 photo without the watermark, and every retake of them after that; we keep their latest photo in your account. It costs $1.99 a person, or $0.99 a person if you have DVcompass Standard or Expert. Taking, retaking and checking photos is free; until a person is unlocked, you see their photos only with a DVcompass watermark.

With Standard or Expert you can also add photos for everyone on your entry — you, your spouse and your children — to the entry’s bill, at $0.99 a person. That covers as many people as the entry lists, as you photograph them; anyone beyond that is $0.99 each.

Without an account, you can pay as a guest: $1.99 buys one photo, which we email to the address you give us once the payment is received. A guest’s payment covers that one photo only — retakes aren’t included, and each new photo is a new order.

The studio is for photographing yourself and the people on your own DV entry. You confirm that you have their permission, or that you are their parent or guardian. It isn’t for taking photos of other people as a service.

We tell people apart by the proportions of their face (see below). A face we don’t recognise as someone already unlocked counts as a new person. If the studio is clearly being used for people outside a family, we may decline to unlock further photos, refunding anything paid for them.

We replace the background with plain white, crop and straighten the photo so your head and eyes sit where the rules ask, and save it as a JPEG the right size. We never retouch your face — the rules forbid it. Our checks follow the U.S. Department of State’s published photo requirements, but the Department decides: we can’t promise a photo will be accepted, or that any entry will be selected.

You pay in rupees by eSewa or Khalti, at the price shown when you order. We check every payment by hand and unlock your photo within 24 hours. If we can’t unlock what you paid for, we refund it. Once a person is unlocked, the payment isn’t refundable — but every retake of them stays free. A guest’s photo is emailed to the address they typed, so check it: if it’s wrong, we can’t know whose photo it is.

The photo from your phone passes through our server on its way to your laptop and is deleted the moment your laptop collects it. The fixing and checking happen on your laptop.

A guest’s photo is kept, encrypted, only until the email with it has gone out — or deleted after seven days if it isn’t paid for — and we keep the email address with the payment record. For a guest we store no face measurements at all. A finished photo you keep or unlock with an account is stored in your account, encrypted (the latest three of each person). To tell people apart we keep, for each person, a short list of proportions of their face — numbers such as the width of the nose relative to the distance between the eyes. It isn’t a picture and can’t be turned back into one. Both are deleted with your account, or sooner if you ask us. More in our privacy policy.

DVcompass is an independent service. We are not the U.S. government or the Department of State, and we are not a law firm.