The official photo tool only crops. It does not make the photo legal.

People trust the .gov URL and stop thinking

The official photo tool is a cropper. It helps you pick a square and export 600×600. That is one of the digital rules, not all of them. A cropped grey wall is still a grey wall. 600×600 of a tiny head still fails the 50–69% chin-to-crown range. A 4 MB original that you crop and re-save can still sit over 240 kB, or it can crush into blocks if the source was already bad.

Colour space, glasses, a window behind the head, and “does this look like you” are not jobs the tool claims. Their own pages say the consular officer decides. “I used the government tool” is not a defence at the window.

Measure after the tool, not instead of it

If you already ran the .gov crop, check what it actually produced: pixels, kilobytes, sRGB, head height, eye line, background. Use that file as the input, not the huge studio original you started with.

A passport file put through the official tool is still only a crop. If the sitting was good, re-export correctly. If the sitting was a cream wall or a scan of a booth print, the tool cannot invent a legal photo.

Questions

The tool accepted my photo. Why did CEAC reject it?

The tool accepted a crop. CEAC still checks file size, encoding, and composition. Those can fail after a “successful” crop.

Should I skip the official tool?

You can use it to get a 600×600 square. Then measure the output. Do not treat the tool as a full compliance check.

Does 600×600 always pass the pixel rule?

It meets the minimum square size. Head height, background, and 240 kB are separate checks.