Passport Photo Sizes by Country — and How to Make One at Home Free
Getting a passport photo used to mean a trip to a pharmacy or a photo studio. These days most applications — passports, visas, exam registrations, ID cards — either accept or outright require a digital photo you upload yourself. Which sounds easier, until the portal rejects your upload three times because the dimensions, background, or file size are wrong.
The requirements themselves aren't complicated. They're just specific, they differ by country, and most photo apps ignore them entirely. Here's what the major ones ask for, and how to produce a compliant photo from a phone picture without paying for it.
Photo dimensions by country
| Country / document | Print size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United States (passport & visa) | 2 × 2 in (51 × 51 mm) | Head must be 1–1⅜ in from chin to top of head; plain white background |
| United Kingdom | 35 × 45 mm | Light grey or cream background for printed photos; digital uploads are checked automatically |
| Schengen countries (visa) | 35 × 45 mm | Face should take up 70–80% of the frame; white or off-white background |
| India (passport, via Passport Seva) | 35 × 45 mm | Digital upload is 630 × 810 px, under 250 KB, on a pure white background. India used the old 2 × 2 in (51 × 51 mm) format for decades but switched to 35 × 45 mm to match ICAO standards — don't use an old 2×2 template |
| Canada | 50 × 70 mm | Larger than most; face height 31–36 mm |
| Australia | 35 × 45 mm | Accepted range is 35–40 mm wide by 45–50 mm high |
| India PAN card | 25 × 35 mm | The small "stamp size" photo affixed to PAN forms. Some newer PAN application forms ask for a larger photo, so check the exact form you're filing |
A few things trip people up more than the size itself:
- The background matters as much as the dimensions. "White or off-white, uniform, no shadows" appears in almost every country's spec. A photo taken against a beige wall with a lamp to one side will fail even if the crop is perfect.
- Print size and pixel size are different things. 35 × 45 mm at 300 DPI works out to 413 × 531 pixels. If a portal asks for pixels, that's usually the math behind the number: millimetres × DPI ÷ 25.4.
- Digital uploads often have a file-size limit too — typically somewhere between 20 KB and 300 KB depending on the portal. That's a separate step from cropping, covered below.
Making the photo yourself
You need three things: a suitable source photo, the right crop, and the right output format.
Take the source photo well and everything else gets easier. Stand facing a window in daylight, against the plainest, lightest wall you have. Have someone else take it (or use a timer) from about 1.5 metres away, at eye level. Neutral expression, both ears visible if your country requires it, no glasses glare. Take five, pick the best one.
Then crop it to spec. Docexp's passport photo maker has the presets from the table above built in — pick your country, drag the photo until your face sits where the guide shows, zoom with the slider, and download. It renders at the exact pixel dimensions for the size and DPI you chose, and it can also lay the photo out as a print-ready 4 × 6 inch PDF sheet with as many copies as fit — the PDF page is sized in real print units, so it comes out at true physical size on any printer without "fit to page" guesswork.
Like every Docexp tool, the photo is processed in your own browser. It's worth saying plainly, because a face photo attached to your name and passport application is exactly the kind of file you shouldn't be casually uploading to whichever free website ranked first: nothing you drop into these tools is sent anywhere. There's no server on the other end at all.
If the background isn't clean enough, the background whitener can push a light-but-uneven background to pure white. Fair warning about how it works: it's a brightness threshold, not AI cutout magic. It does a good job when you're clearly darker than the wall behind you — which is exactly the "photo against a light wall" case — and a poor job on busy backgrounds. If your photo has a bookshelf behind you, retake it rather than trying to fix it.
Hitting the file-size limit
This is the step that catches most people. Your cropped photo comes out at, say, 380 KB, and the portal wants 20–50 KB.
Don't re-crop or screenshot it smaller — use the exact-size image compressor, type the upper limit from your form (50 KB, say), and let it find the highest JPEG quality that fits under the number. It searches for the target instead of making you guess with a quality slider, which is the difference between one attempt and six.
The order that works
- Take a good source photo against a light wall.
- Crop with the passport photo maker using your country's preset.
- Whiten the background if needed — or retake the photo if it's busy.
- Compress to the portal's KB limit with the exact-size compressor.
- Upload once, pass once.
One caution to end on: photo specs do get revised, and embassies publish the authoritative version. If you're applying for something high-stakes, spend thirty seconds checking the official requirements page for your specific document before you shoot — then come back and make the photo match it.