Indian Passport Photo Size

The print size comes from the Passport Seva instruction booklet of the Ministry of External Affairs, which tells applicants to paste a recent color photograph of 4.5 cm by 3.5 cm in the box on the form, on a plain white background. The pixel size comes from the Embassy of India in Astana, whose guidelines for applications through the Global Passport Seva portal give 630 × 810 pixels, with the face taking up 80 to 85 percent of the photograph.

The table above shows India next to three other countries, so you can see why a photo made for one rarely works for another: the US uses a 2 × 2 inch square, the UK the same 35 × 45 mm as India but with a different background rule, and Canada a much larger 50 × 70 mm print.

Both documents describe the same photo in two forms: a printed one for the paper application form and a digital one for online uploads. Rules about the background, the expression and the visibility of the face apply to both, and both ask for a recent photograph. Requirements can change, so open the linked pages once before you apply.

Most of the booklet's rules are about how the photo is taken rather than its size. The face must be shown from the front, with the eyes open, both edges of the face and both ears visible, and the head in the center of the frame. The expression should be natural, with no grinning, frowning or raised eyebrows, and there must be no distracting shadows on the face or the background.

Each point in the list below is taken from the booklet or the embassy guidelines.

This page starts with India passport & visa — 35×45 mm, which crops your photo to 35 mm wide and 45 mm tall and saves it at 300 dpi for printing. The head guide helps you center the face as the booklet asks. The background is left as you photographed it, because the embassy guidelines say photos should be unaltered by computer software; take the picture against a plain white wall rather than replacing the background afterwards.

For an online application that asks for 630 × 810 pixels, choose Custom size in the document list, set the unit to px and enter 630 and 810. The crop keeps the same proportions as 35 × 45 mm, so the face fills a similar share of the frame.

The embassy guidelines add practical points for the photo session itself: the picture should be taken from about 1.5 meters away, so the face is not distorted, with uniform lighting, no flash reflections, no red eye and the mouth closed. A second person holding the phone at that distance gives a far better result than a selfie.

The booklet rules out photos printed from a computer, so do not print the passport photo on an office or home printer. Download the file, or a sheet of copies made under Advanced settings, and have it printed at a photo studio or lab on photo paper. Check that the print is at actual size: it must fill the 4.5 × 3.5 cm box on the form without being smaller.

For other forms that only ask for a "passport size" photo, such as school or job applications, the passport size photo maker lays eight copies on an A4 sheet. Photos for other countries are in the Passport Photo Maker page, and if you only need to make an image smaller for an upload limit, Compress Image does that.