How to Create Event Badges and ID Cards from a Spreadsheet

ID cards and event badges are a slightly different problem than most bulk PDF work, because on top of text (name, title, company, employee ID) they usually need a photo per person, not the same logo repeated on every card. That's exactly the kind of job that turns into a long afternoon of manual copy-paste in a design tool if you don't have a way to map an image column, not just a text column, to a template.

What you need

• Your badge or ID card design as a PDF. Export the layout once, with the logo, colors, and any static branding already in place.
• A spreadsheet with one row per person, including a name column, a title or department column, and a column of photo URLs if each badge needs an individual photo.

A photo URL column, not an embedded image, is what you need here: a link to each person's headshot hosted somewhere accessible (a shared drive with public links, a company photo directory, an HR system export). AutoPDF fetches the image from that URL at generation time and places it in the field.

Step by step

1. Upload the badge template to AutoPDF. It renders at actual size so you're placing fields on the real card dimensions.
2. Upload the spreadsheet with names, titles, and photo URLs as columns.
3. Place text fields for name, title, department, or ID number, sized and aligned to match the badge design.
4. Add an image field where the photo goes, sized to the photo slot on the badge, and map it to the photo URL column. Choose how the photo should fit the box: contain (whole photo visible, may letterbox), cover (fills the box, may crop), or stretch.
5. Preview a real badge to confirm the photo crops sensibly and text doesn't overlap it, before running the full batch.
6. Generate the batch. Name each file by employee ID or attendee name so printing or distribution is straightforward.

Tips for photo fields

• Use "cover" for headshots if everyone's photo is a different aspect ratio, so each one fills its slot consistently instead of leaving uneven white space.
• Keep photo URLs publicly reachable. If a link requires a login to view, generation can't fetch it, and that row's badge will show a missing image instead.
• Test with a mix of portrait and landscape photos in your preview row if your source photos aren't all the same shape, since that's where fit settings matter most.

For everything unrelated to photos, field placement, mapping columns, previewing, generating the batch, the process is identical to any other bulk PDF job. See how to automate PDF generation from Excel data for the general walkthrough.