Passport Photo Requirements by Country: Four Size Families, One Master Shot

A passport photo has one job: to let an officer, and more and more often a face-matching system at a border gate, compare the picture with the person holding the passport. The Australian Passport Office says so on its photo guidelines page, where it explains that many countries use biometric technology to match your face against the image in your passport. Because the job is the same everywhere, the rules converge. Almost every office asks for a recent color photo, a plain light background, a straight-on face with eyes open, even lighting and no retouching.

What varies is mostly the frame around the face: the size of the print, how tall the head must be inside it, the exact shade of background, and whether the office wants a file, a print or both. Those differences are small, but they are the ones that get a photo returned, because they are easy to measure. This guide groups countries by print size, the property that decides how you crop, and then covers the background and head-height rules that change how you shoot. The aim is practical: if you need photos for a passport, a visa and a residence card in the same year, you should be able to take one photo and cut all three from it.

Each family below links the official page its numbers come from, and the sizes here cover passports and a few common visas rather than every document in every country. Residence permits, national ID cards and driving licenses often borrow a passport size but add their own rules, and some consulates set a visa size that differs from their own country's passport. Treat the families as a map that tells you which crop to start from, then confirm the details on the issuing office's page on the day you print or upload, because these pages are revised without notice.

The largest family uses a rectangle 35 mm wide and 45 mm tall, about 1.38 by 1.77 inches. The UK asks for exactly that on its printed photo requirements, with the head between 29 and 34 mm from chin to crown. India's passport instruction booklet describes the same box as 4.5 cm by 3.5 cm, and the Schengen consulates use it for visas; the Czech foreign ministry's visa photo page is one example. Australia sits in the family too, with a range of 35 to 40 mm wide and 45 to 50 mm high, so a 35 × 45 mm print is inside its limits.

Members of this family often share the print size but not the digital rules. The UK, for example, asks for at least 600 × 750 pixels and a file between 50 KB and 10 MB on its digital photo page, a portrait shape that a square file would fail. The table below shows the official numbers side by side, with a dash where an office does not publish a digital size. If you are applying to India, the Indian passport photo size page walks through the booklet's rules in detail, and Australia's visa photo, which differs from the passport photo in places, has its own page on Australian visa photo size.

The United States is the anchor of the square family. Its passport photo page asks for a 2 × 2 inch print, 51 × 51 mm, with the head between 1 and 1 3/8 inches, 25 to 35 mm, from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head, on a plain white or off-white background. US visas use the same square, and the visa photo page puts the head size another way: between 50 and 69 percent of the image's height. For a digital file that is the more useful number, because it holds at any pixel size.

A square is a different shape from every other family, and that matters for the master shot. Cropping a 35 × 45 mm rectangle out of a square photo is easy; cropping a square out of a tight rectangle is not, because the square needs extra width beside the shoulders. A master photo that leaves generous space on both sides of the head serves the square family without trouble. The US passport photo requirements page puts the US rules and their sources in one place, and the step-by-step guide to a 600 × 600 visa file and a 2 × 2 print from one shot covers the arithmetic for the square in pixels.

Canada is the largest outlier. Canada's passport photo page asks for a print 50 mm wide and 70 mm high, with the face, chin to crown, between 31 and 36 mm. The head is therefore a smaller share of the photo than in the US or the UK, and there is more background around it. Canada also has the strictest printing rules of the big families: prints must be made professionally on photo paper, with the photographer's or studio's name, address and the date on the back. For online renewals it takes a digital file of at least 1200 × 1800 pixels. The Canadian passport photo requirements page covers the details.

China's visa photo is a narrow outlier in the other direction. The Chinese consulate in Los Angeles lists the visa photo rules as 48 × 33 mm, with the head 28 to 33 mm tall and 15 to 22 mm wide, on a white background. That is 3 mm taller and 2 mm narrower than the common size, close enough to look the same and far enough to be measured. Other consulates name their own sizes too, so for any visa the consulate's page is the one to trust. The cards below compare the three shapes most likely to catch you out.

A master photo is a single, uncropped portrait taken with every family's crop in mind. The idea is to shoot wider than any one document needs, so that the tightest crop, Canada's tall rectangle with its small head, and the widest, the US square, can both be cut from it. In practice that means the head, from chin to crown, should take up roughly a third of the frame's height, with the full shoulders visible, clear space above the hair and equal space on both sides. Hold the phone upright and stand it on something steady at eye height, about a meter and a half from your face, so the lens does not distort your nose and forehead.

Resolution is the other half of the plan. Canada's online renewal asks for at least 1200 × 1800 pixels with the chin-to-crown height between 45 and 50 percent of the image, so the head alone needs around 800 to 900 pixels. A phone camera at its normal 12-megapixel setting gives a portrait about 3000 pixels wide and 4000 tall, and a head filling a third of that height is roughly 1300 pixels, which leaves headroom for every family. Use the main rear camera rather than the front one where you can, switch off portrait or beauty modes, and keep the original file: every later crop should start from it, not from a copy that a chat app has already shrunk.

Background color is the rule most likely to make one master photo unusable for some countries. The US asks for white or off-white, India and China for white, Canada for white or light-colored, and Australia for white or light gray. The UK is the odd one out on paper, asking for cream or light gray for printed photos, though its digital photo page only asks for a plain, light-colored background in clear contrast with you. A plain white or very pale wall therefore meets every family on this page, while a gray wall rules out several. Shoot against white, and you will never need to replace the background for one country and not another.

Head height is the second difference, and it is the one cropping controls. Each office sets a range for the distance from chin to crown, either in millimeters on the print or as a share of the image. The ranges overlap less than the print sizes suggest: the head is about half of a US square but well under half of a Canadian print. Because you set head height when you crop, not when you shoot, one master photo can meet every range. The figures below give the official ranges for four offices.

With a master photo in hand, each application is a crop and an export. In the Passport Photo Maker, pick the document under Country & document, turn on the Head-size guide to see the chin-to-crown range for that document, and let Auto-center face place the eyes and chin, adjusting by hand if needed. The tool then exports a single file for an online form, or a 4×6 in sheet or A4 sheet of copies for printing. Repeat with the next document, always starting from the same master, and name each file after the country and document so the right one goes to the right office.

Two checks are worth doing every time. First, recency: the UK says its photo must have been taken in the last month, while the US and Canada accept six months, so a master taken for a US passport in spring may be too old for a UK application in summer. Second, printing: Canada and Australia set rules on paper and printing method that a home printer may not meet, so for those two the safer route is to take the exported file to a photo lab. If a form only says "passport size" without naming a country, the guide on what passport size means on a form with no size explains how to read it.