Passport photo requirements by country: sizes, backgrounds and rules

Passport photo rejections are rarely about the photograph being bad. They are about a measurement being wrong — a head three millimetres too tall, a background that reads as off-white, a print at the wrong resolution. The requirements are precise, they differ by country, and almost nobody is told what they are before the photo is taken.

This is the reference: what the major authorities ask for, what the rules are actually protecting, and how to hit them without a trip to a photo booth.

The two families of passport photo

Nearly every country's specification descends from one of two shapes.

The 35 × 45 mm portrait is the ICAO-derived standard used across Europe, most of Asia, Australia, New Zealand and much of Africa. Head height is typically 32–36 mm, and the background is usually a plain light grey rather than white.

The 2 × 2 inch square (51 × 51 mm) is the US standard, also used by India and Saudi Arabia. Head height is 25–35 mm — proportionally smaller, because the frame is squarer and leaves more room around the subject. The background is plain white.

The exceptions are worth knowing precisely, because they are the ones people get wrong by assuming the standard applies: Canada and Brazil use 50 × 70 mm, China uses 33 × 48 mm, the UAE uses 43 × 55 mm, Türkiye uses 50 × 60 mm, and Malaysia uses 35 × 50 mm.

Reference table

Dimensions in millimetres. Head height is the chin-to-crown measurement, which is the number most often responsible for a rejection.

Every one of these is printed at 300 DPI. That is not a suggestion — it is what makes a 35 × 45 mm photo a 413 × 531 pixel image, and it is the second most common cause of rejection after head height.

Always check the issuing authority's own page before you submit. Specifications change, some countries publish additional rules for children or religious head coverings, and a table on the internet is a starting point, not an authority. OpusImg's per-country passport pages link directly to each authority's published specification for exactly this reason.

What the rules are actually protecting

The requirements look arbitrary until you know they exist to serve automated face matching at a border. Once you see that, they stop being trivia.

Head height determines the number of pixels across the face. Too small and the biometric system has too little to work with; too large and the crown or chin gets cut. The 32–36 mm window on a 45 mm-tall photo means the face fills roughly three quarters of the frame — enough resolution for matching, with margin for the crop.

A plain background exists so that head segmentation is unambiguous. A patterned wall, a shadow behind the shoulder, or a doorframe gives the matcher edges that are not part of you. This is also why "plain white" fails when the wall is actually cream, and why a shadow cast onto a white wall can be rejected even though the wall is the right colour.

Neutral expression, mouth closed, eyes open and visible keeps facial landmarks in their canonical positions. A smile moves the mouth corners and changes the cheek geometry, which is precisely what the matcher measures.

No glasses in most modern specifications — the US, the UK, Australia and the Schengen states all now require them removed. Glare and frame edges obscure the eye region, which carries a disproportionate share of the matching signal.

Uniform lighting, no shadows on the face or behind the head. Shadows create false edges and change the apparent shape of features.

The five reasons applications actually get rejected

In roughly the order they occur:

1. Head height out of range. Almost always too large — people crop tightly because it looks like a better portrait. It is not a portrait; it is a measurement.
2. The background is not what you think it is. A white wall photographed in warm indoor light is cream. A grey wall in shade is blue-grey. Cameras adapt to make walls look white to you; the file does not necessarily agree.
3. Shadow behind the head. Standing close to a wall with a light source above and in front puts a hard shadow directly behind you. Standing a metre away from the wall almost entirely eliminates it.
4. Wrong resolution. A 400 × 500 pixel image printed at 35 × 45 mm is around 290 DPI and will usually pass; a 200 × 250 pixel image is 145 DPI and will not. Photos pulled from social media are frequently in the second category.
5. Expression or eye issues. Slight smile, hair across an eye, glasses, head tilted.

Note what is missing from that list: photo quality in any artistic sense. A flat, unflattering, evenly lit photo passes. A beautiful one with a shadow fails.

Taking a compliant photo at home

You need a phone camera, a plain wall, and a window.

Position. Stand about a metre in front of the wall, not against it. That single change eliminates most background shadows.

Light. Face a window during daylight, with the window in front of you and the wall behind. Turn off overhead lights, which cast downward shadows into the eye sockets and under the nose. Overcast daylight is ideal; direct sun is not.

Camera. Have someone else hold the phone at your eye level, roughly two metres away, and use the rear camera. Do not use a selfie at arm's length: the wide lens at close range enlarges the nose and narrows the ears, which is exactly the kind of geometric distortion a biometric matcher is designed to notice. Two metres with the rear camera gives a natural facial geometry.

Framing. Include your full head and the top of your shoulders, with space above the head. Crop later; you cannot uncrop.

Expression. Neutral, mouth closed, eyes open, looking straight at the lens. Both ears visible if your hair allows. No glasses.

Then crop to the specification, which is the part that is genuinely hard to do by eye. A tool that detects the face and measures chin-to-crown against your target country's range removes the guesswork: OpusImg's passport photo tool does the detection, scales the head into the legal window, composites the correct background colour, and exports at 300 DPI — either as a single photo or a print sheet.

Printing without ruining it

More home-made passport photos fail at the printing stage than at the photography stage.

Print at 300 DPI, at the exact physical size. "Fit to page" and "scale to fit" are the enemy here; they resize your carefully-measured photo to whatever the printer prefers, and the head height goes with it. Print at 100% scale.

Use photo paper, glossy or matte. Plain office paper absorbs ink, dulls contrast, and is often explicitly disallowed.

A 4 × 6 inch print sheet is cheaper and safer. Most photo services print 4 × 6 for pennies. A sheet containing multiple correctly-sized photos, cut apart with a ruler and a sharp blade, costs less than one booth session and gives you spares — which you will need, because applications often ask for two.

Do not crop the print at the shop. Print the full sheet and cut it yourself against the guides.

Digital submissions have their own rules

Increasingly the photo is uploaded rather than printed, and the constraints change:

• File size limits are common and often tight — a few hundred kilobytes. If your compliant photo is 4 MB, it needs compressing, not re-taking. Compress at quality 85 or higher; heavy compression on a face is visible and can itself cause a rejection.
• Pixel dimension minimums and maximums are frequently specified, and some systems reject an image that is too large as readily as one too small.
• JPEG is almost always required. Not PNG, not HEIC. A photo straight from an iPhone is HEIC by default and will be rejected by systems that have never heard of it — it needs converting to JPEG first.
• Metadata is sometimes stripped or rejected. Some systems refuse files carrying editing software tags.

A note on privacy

A passport photo is a biometric identity document tied to your name, date of birth and travel history. Uploading it to a free online tool means handing that to a third party whose retention policy you have not read.

This is one of the clearest cases for on-device processing. OpusImg's passport tool runs face detection and composition in your browser — the file is never uploaded, and there is no server-side copy to retain, breach, or be compelled to hand over. When you are working with the single most sensitive photograph of your face that you will ever produce, "it never left your device" is a materially different guarantee from "we delete it after an hour".

If your source is a photo of an existing document rather than a fresh portrait, the ID card cropper detects and straightens the document itself, also on-device.