Grant camera permission to begin. On a phone or tablet this page must be served over https or localhost.
How to take the three photographs. Read it once through before your first patient; after that the contents list below is enough to jump back to a step.
This page helps you take face photographs that can be compared with each other. It draws fixed marks over the live camera picture. You move the patient until they line up with the marks, then you press the shutter.
The marks never move while you work. That is the whole idea. Because they sit in the same place for every photograph, a patient photographed today and again in six months will be at the same height, the same angle and the same distance, and their face will be the same size in the frame. Without that, you cannot tell what has genuinely changed from what merely moved.
Nothing leaves this device. Photographs are saved straight to the Downloads folder of the tablet or computer you are using. There is no login, no patient list, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Then set the age group in Menu → Patient preset: child, adolescent or adult. A child's face is smaller, so the guides are tuned to keep them standing in roughly the same place an adult would. Choosing the right one saves shuffling the patient about.
Every patient gets three: one profile (side view), and two frontal (front view) — one relaxed, one smiling.
The checklist in the top-right corner shows all three. Each turns green once taken, and the one you are about to take is outlined. Press Reset before the next patient. It is only a checklist: it holds no names and stores nothing about the patient.
Choose Menu → Shot → profile. You will see two horizontal lines.
Positioning the patient:
Why two landmarks on one line? One point tells you only how high the head is. Two points also tell you whether the head is tipped up or down. Getting that chin-up / chin-down angle the same every time is most of what makes two profiles comparable at all.
Why the second line sets the distance. The gap between the two lines is fixed, and the distance from a patient's brow to their Frankfort line is fixed too — it is their face. Both can only match at one particular distance from the camera. So the patient stepping forward and back until both lines fit is the distance measurement. You never need a tape measure.
Choose Menu → Shot → frontal. Both frontal photos use exactly the same guides.
You will see two short marks labelled PUPILS, each with a gap in the middle. Put a pupil in each gap. The gap is there so the mark never covers the pupil you are trying to line it up with.
That one step fixes four things at once: how high the eyes sit, how far left or right the head is, whether the head is tilted sideways, and how far away the patient is standing. The distance works exactly as it does in profile — the two marks are a fixed distance apart, and so is the gap between the patient's own pupils, so only one camera distance makes them match.
The faint thin line running between the two marks is only there to help you spot a sideways head tilt. It is not something to line anything up with.
Check the on-screen reminder too: both ears equally visible. If you can see more of one ear than the other, the head is turned — straighten it.
Then take them in order:
Between those two photographs the only thing allowed to change is the patient's expression. If they shift position, the pair cannot be compared — and comparing them is the entire reason for taking two.
The page will not move from repose to smiling by itself. That is deliberate: it would be one more thing happening between two photos that are meant to be identical.
In the frontal view there is a dashed amber line down the middle, tagged REFERENCE — NOT A TARGET.
Do not line the nose or the chin up with it.
It is there so you can see whether the head is turned. As a head turns, the nose and the philtrum shift sideways compared with the eyes, and that shift is far easier to spot against a straight vertical than on its own.
Many people are naturally asymmetric — the chin, nose or dental midline genuinely sits to one side of the midpoint of the eyes. That is a real finding, and it is often the very thing the photograph is being taken to record.
Such a patient cannot put their nose on that line while facing straight ahead. The only way to manage it is to turn the head — which spoils the photograph and hides the finding at the same time. You would be trading a real asymmetry you can measure for a fake straightness you cannot.
So: pupils in the gaps, ears equally visible, and leave the vertical line alone.
Press the large round button at the bottom of the screen. On a computer the spacebar does the same, unless you are typing in the menu. The screen flashes and a message confirms the save.
Each press saves three files:
Names look like profile_20260815-143205-841_adult_clean.jpg, and start with profile, frontal_repose or frontal_smiling. They are timestamped, so they always sort into the order they were taken.
The first time, the browser may ask whether to allow downloading several files at once. Say yes — otherwise you will get only the first of the three, and the clinical image is the one you keep. On an iPad the files land in Files → Downloads.
Two warnings can appear at the top left:
It does not find faces, detect landmarks, score how well you lined the patient up, measure symmetry, or take the photograph for you. Everything here is a fixed mark and your own eye. It keeps no patient records — the checklist holds no names and is cleared with Reset.
It also gives you no guide on the lips, the corners of the mouth, or the chin, and that is deliberate. Orthodontic treatment moves all of them, and smile analysis is the measurement. Framing on something that is meant to change would destroy the very comparison you are trying to make.
Frame on the eyes. Measure the mouth.