Almost everything written about passport photos is a list of rules copied from an official page. That is useful once you already have a photo. It is no help at all at the moment you are standing in front of a wall holding a phone.
So this is the other half. What the rule actually is, why photos come back, and how to take one that passes on the first try.
The tool Passport Photo Official sizes for 20 countries, with a print sheet you can take to any shop.The rule is your head, not the photo
Every country publishes a photo size — 35 × 45 mm across most of the world, 2 × 2 inches in the United States, 50 × 70 mm in Canada and Brazil. That number is the easy part, and it is not what your photo is checked against.
What is checked is the height of your head inside that photo, measured from the bottom of your chin to the top of your head — the crown, not the top of your hair if it stands up. Get that wrong and the photo is rejected no matter how good the picture is or how exactly right the outer dimensions are.
Put the eighteen specifications side by side and something becomes obvious: the photo sizes vary a lot and the head proportion barely does.
In thirteen of the seventeen that publish a figure, the head is meant to fill roughly 70 to 80 percent of the frame’s height. The exceptions are the countries using a taller photo — Canada and Brazil, at 50 × 70 mm, want about half — along with China, Mexico and the United States, which sit in between.
That is the single most useful thing to know before you start, because it tells you what the picture has to look like: head and the top of the shoulders, and very little else. Almost everybody’s first attempt is too far away.
The shadow is geometry, not bad luck
The commonest reason a home photo comes back is a shadow — either on the wall behind you or across one side of your face. It looks like a lighting problem you cannot solve without equipment. It is a positioning problem, and it takes one step to fix.
Stand away from the wall. A metre is plenty. A shadow lands on the wall because you are close enough to it to cast one; move forward and the shadow falls on the floor behind you, out of frame. Nothing else changes.
Then the light. Two rules, and they are both about where it comes from:
- Face a window. Daylight from in front of you, on an overcast day or in open shade, is the most flattering and most even light there is, and it is free. Do not put the window behind you — that gives a bright background and a dark face, which is a rejection.
- Turn the flash off. A flash on a phone sits centimetres from the lens, so it throws a hard shadow directly behind whatever it lights, and it produces red eye and shine on the forehead. If the room is too dark for a photo without flash, the room is too dark.
Overhead ceiling lights are the other trap: they come from above, so they put shadows in the eye sockets and under the nose. Turning them off and facing a window is usually an improvement.
Do not take it at arm’s length
This one is invisible until somebody explains it, and it is why a selfie can look wrong without looking obviously wrong.
A camera exaggerates whatever is closest to it. At arm’s length your nose is meaningfully nearer the lens than your ears are, so it comes out larger, your face looks wider in the middle and narrower at the edges, and the proportions of your head change. Officials do not reject photos for "perspective distortion" as such, but face-matching software compares proportions, and a picture where they have been altered by the camera is a picture that matches you less well.
The fix costs nothing. Have somebody else take it from about two metres away and step back so your whole upper body is in shot, then crop in afterwards. A modern phone has pixels to spare — cropping to a head-and-shoulders frame from two metres leaves far more than any passport office needs.
If you are alone: prop the phone up, use the timer, and stand back. The result is better than any selfie, every time.
Glasses: the rule changed and most advice has not
The United States banned eyeglasses in passport photos in November 2016. Plenty of pages written before then are still online, still say glasses are fine, and still rank.
It is not uniform. Broadly:
| Where | Glasses |
|---|---|
| United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, Philippines | Not allowed |
| Canada, Italy, Spain | Allowed, if the eyes are fully visible with no glare |
| Schengen, India, China, Japan, Argentina, South Africa, Russia | Tolerated, and best avoided |
Each country page states its own position and links the official source, because these do change.
The practical answer is the same everywhere: take them off. Even where glasses are permitted, they add three ways to fail — glare, a frame crossing the eye, a lens that darkens indoors — for no benefit at all.
Expression: neutral almost everywhere
Mouth closed, looking straight at the camera, both eyes open and visible, ears not required.
The United States is the notable exception and explicitly allows a natural smile as well as a neutral expression. Nearly everywhere else asks for neutral, and a broad smile changes the shape of the face enough that automated matching does worse with it.
Neutral does not mean grim. It means the face you have when you are not doing anything with it.
What "plain background" actually requires
Usually white or off-white; Britain asks for light grey rather than white, and a few countries specify pale blue. What matters more than the exact shade is that it is plain, matte and unbroken.
Things that count as broken: a light switch, a picture rail, a door frame, the join between two walls, a curtain, textured wallpaper, and — most often — the shadow you now know how to avoid.
A plain wall is easiest. A bedsheet works if it is pulled properly tight; a creased one photographs as grey streaks and gets the photo returned.
Software that replaces the background is a poor substitute for a real one. It cuts a hard, slightly wrong edge around hair, and that edge is exactly what somebody looking for a digitally altered photo notices. Photographing a plain wall is easier than repairing a busy one.
Nothing may be retouched
Worth saying plainly, because phones now do some of this without being asked. Beauty filters, skin smoothing, teeth whitening and "portrait mode" background blur are all grounds for rejection, and several phones apply a degree of smoothing by default in the front camera.
Cropping, rotating and adjusting overall brightness are fine — they do not change your face. Anything that changes your face is not.
Printing it
Two numbers, and then it is a solved problem.
Passport photos are printed at 300 dots per inch, which is what any photo lab prints at anyway. A 35 × 45 mm photo at 300 dpi is 413 × 531 pixels — a trivial amount for any phone, which is why resolution is almost never the thing that goes wrong.
The efficient way to print is not to print one. Put several copies on a standard 4 × 6 inch print, send that single image to any photo kiosk or online lab, and cut them out. You pay for one print instead of a photo booth, and you have spares for the visa application nobody warned you about. The tool builds that sheet for you at whatever size the country requires.
Submitting it online
Digital applications add a constraint the printed version does not have: a file size limit, often a strict one. India’s and several others sit in the tens of kilobytes.
The order matters here, and doing it the other way round is what ruins the photo. Crop to the required frame first, then compress — never compress a large photo and crop afterwards, because you will have spent the file size budget on the parts you were about to throw away. If it is still too large, reducing the pixel dimensions costs you less than crushing the quality does.
Before you send it
Run through this once. It is faster than a rejection.
- Head between about 70 and 80 percent of the frame height — or roughly half, for Canada and Brazil
- Facing the camera squarely, not turned, not tilted
- Both eyes open, visible, no hair across them
- Mouth closed, neutral
- No glasses
- Background plain and unbroken, no shadow on it
- No shadow across the face
- Nothing on your head except for religious dress, which is allowed nearly everywhere as long as the face from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead is uncovered
- Taken recently — most authorities say within the last six months
- Not retouched, not filtered, not blurred behind
The photo itself is the easy part. It is the head size and the shadow that send people back for a second attempt, and both are decided before you press the button.