How to take a passport photo at home (any country)

Sources read on 18 August 2026. Every requirement quoted here comes from the issuing authority’s own page. Those pages change without notice, and the official one is binding — not this one. Check yours before you submit.

A rejected passport photo is an expensive mistake mostly because of how slowly you find out. The application goes in, weeks pass, and then a letter arrives saying the photograph does not meet the requirements. Nothing about the waiting was useful, and you are back at the start.

What makes the problem tractable is that home photographs fail for a small and stable set of reasons, and almost none of them are about the camera. Any phone made in the last several years resolves far more detail than any passport authority asks for. The failures are geometry and light — where you stood, where the light came from, and how much of the frame your head filled.

Why home photos get rejected

An honest caveat first. No passport authority publishes statistics on why photographs are rejected, so any ranked list with percentages attached was invented by whoever wrote it. What follows is ordered by how easily each mistake is made without noticing, which is not the same thing but is more useful.

Head size comes first because it is invisible to the person taking the photograph. A picture that looks like a good portrait almost always has the head far too small in the frame.

A shadow behind the head is second, and for the same reason: when you look at a photograph of your own face, you look at the face. The United Kingdom requires that a photo “not have any shadows on your face or behind you”, and Australia asks for “uniform lighting (no shadows or reflections)”.

Uneven light across the face — one side brighter than the other, or dark sockets under the brow — is third, and is usually a symptom of the same bad light that caused the shadow.

Expression is fourth. A smile that crept in, a mouth fractionally open, eyes caught mid-blink on the one frame you happened to keep.

Glasses are fifth and are pure carelessness, because people forget they are wearing them. The United States stopped accepting them in visa photos on 1 November 2016 and tells passport applicants to “take off any eyeglasses, sunglasses, or tinted glasses”. Canada and New Zealand still allow prescription lenses, provided the eyes are clearly visible and there is no glare.

Resolution is last, and it is nearly always self-inflicted. The original file was fine, and something downstream — a screenshot, a messaging app, an over-aggressive crop — threw the pixels away.

The shadow is a distance problem

A shadow lands wherever the straight line from the light, through you, meets a surface. Stand close to a wall and that surface is the wall, right behind your head, inside the frame. Step away and the same shadow falls further down and further back, until it drops out of the picture entirely.

New Zealand’s passport service puts a number on it and says to stand at least half a metre in front of the background. That is the whole fix, and it costs nothing.

Distance also softens what remains. A shadow has a hard edge only when the light source is small relative to the subject; a bare ceiling bulb is close to a point, so it draws a sharp outline. A window two metres across, a metre from your face, is an enormous source by comparison, and its shadows have edges so wide they read as a gentle gradient rather than a shape.

Direction is the other half. Overhead light is the worst case for a passport photograph, because it drops shadow straight into the eye sockets and under the nose — precisely the features a reviewer is checking. Light striking you squarely from one side splits the face into a bright half and a dark half, which fails any “uniform lighting” wording outright.

The arrangement that works is unglamorous. Face a window on an overcast day, or one out of direct sun. Put your plain background on a wall running at right angles to that window, so the light comes over the camera’s shoulder rather than across you. Stand half a metre to a metre off that wall. Turn the ceiling lights off — mixing daylight with a warm bulb gives you a second shadow and a colour cast in the same frame.

Standing further back is the whole trick

Perspective is a function of camera-to-subject distance and nothing else. Focal length only decides how much of the scene you keep; it does not change the shape of a face. The reason a longer lens is said to flatter is indirect — to fill the frame with a head at 85 mm you are forced to stand much further away than at 24 mm, and it is the standing back that does the work.

The effect at close range is not subtle. A study published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery by researchers at Rutgers and Stanford modelled it and found that a selfie taken at about 12 inches makes the nasal base appear roughly 30 per cent wider and the nasal tip about 7 per cent wider than the same face photographed at five feet, which they describe as a standard portrait distance. A reviewer comparing your photograph with your face does not need to know the arithmetic to notice the result.

New Zealand’s own instructions ask the photographer to stand 1.5 metres away and hold the camera at the subject’s eye level. Both halves matter. Camera height above eye level tilts the head downward and foreshortens the forehead; below eye level does the opposite and widens the jaw.

In practice this means handing the phone to someone else. Have them stand back a metre and a half to two metres and use the 2× or 3× lens if the phone has one, or shoot on the main lens and crop. A phone’s default rear camera is a wide-angle lens, and an arm’s-length selfie on it is the worst available combination of short distance and wide field of view.

Head height is a proportion, not a measurement

This is the part that explains why one photograph passes in one country and fails in the next, and it surprises people who assume there is a single international standard.

The United States is the one authority that publishes a percentage — and it does so for visas rather than passports. On its visa photo composition template, the top of the head including the hair, down to the bottom of the chin, must be between 50 and 69 per cent of the image’s total height, with the eyes sitting between 56 and 69 per cent of the way up from the bottom edge. The US passport page states the same framing in inches instead: a head of 1 to 1⅜ inches (25 to 35 mm) on a 2 × 2 inch (51 mm) photo, which works out at 49 to 69 per cent. Most other authorities publish millimetres only. The United Kingdom wants a 45 mm-tall photo with the head measuring 29 to 34 mm from crown to chin. Canada wants a 70 mm-tall photo with the face 31 to 36 mm. Australia allows a photo 45 to 50 mm high with the face between 32 and 36 mm.

Convert those to proportions and the picture changes completely. The British range works out at roughly 64 to 76 per cent of frame height; the Canadian range at roughly 44 to 51 per cent. So a photograph framed with the head filling 70 per cent of the image is comfortably correct for a British passport, over the American ceiling, and nowhere near acceptable for a Canadian one. Frame it at 48 per cent and you have a valid Canadian photo that is below the American floor and far below the British one.

There is a second trap underneath the first. The measurements are not defined identically — the American rule measures to the top of the head including the hair, while the British rule measures from “the crown of your head” and does not say what that means. Canada and Australia both gloss the same word as “top of head”, which is the American reading. On someone with a lot of volume in their hair those are visibly different lines on the same photograph.

This is exactly the kind of thing worth letting software hold for you. The passport photo maker carries the published proportion for each country and draws the head-height and eye-line guides over your own picture, so you can see whether the framing is right before you commit rather than six weeks afterwards.

The printed spec and the upload spec are different documents

Almost every authority now maintains two specifications for the same photograph, and they are written in different units by different parts of the organisation.

The printed spec is physical: millimetres or inches, a head measured in millimetres, printed on photo paper. The digital spec is pixels and bytes, and it exists because a web form has to validate an upload automatically.

The gaps between them are wider than people expect. A United States visa photo must be square, between 600 × 600 and 1200 × 1200 pixels, JPEG, 24-bit colour in sRGB, and 240 kB or smaller, with a compression ratio no greater than 20:1. A British digital photo must be at least 600 pixels wide by 750 tall and between 50 KB and 10 MB. A New Zealand digital photo must have a 3:4 aspect ratio, measure 900 to 4500 pixels wide and 1200 to 6000 tall, and weigh between 250 KB and 5 MB.

Read those three again and notice that New Zealand’s minimum file size is above the American maximum. There is no single file that satisfies both. Notice too that two of the three specify a floor as well as a ceiling, on the reasonable assumption that a very small file implies a very low-detail photograph.

One more figure varies more than anyone expects, and it is the cheapest to get wrong: how old the photograph may be. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all work to six months. The United Kingdom asks for a photo taken in the last month. A picture that is perfectly framed and five months old is fine in four of those five countries and refused in the fifth.

A kilobyte ceiling is a compression problem, not a resizing problem, and confusing the two is the most common way to produce a file that uploads and then fails review. The dimensions stay exactly as specified while JPEG quality comes down until the file fits. Shrinking the image to save bytes gives you a file that is under the limit and the wrong size. The full order of operations — crop, then resize, then compress — is worked through in the guide on compressing a photo for a visa application.

One more file-level trap: an iPhone photographs in HEIC by default, and most government upload forms accept JPEG only. The rejection message rarely says so. Converting to JPG first removes a whole category of confusing failure.

If you have no plain wall

The requirement is not really “white”. It is uniform, unshadowed, and contrasting with your face and hair. Britain asks for “a plain light-coloured background”, Canada for “plain white or light-coloured”, Australia for “plain white or light grey background that contrasts with your face”. The United States is stricter and asks specifically for plain white or off-white, free of shadows, textures or objects.

Where a choice is allowed, pure white is not automatically the best one. Someone with fair or grey hair photographed against a white wall loses the outline of their head where the two tones meet, which is exactly the boundary an automated checker is trying to find. A light grey background gives a cleaner edge.

The physical options are duller than people hope and they work. The back of a painted internal door is usually the flattest, cleanest surface in a home. A pale bedsheet taped taut to a wall is fine provided it really is taut — creases photograph as texture, and texture is disqualifying. Standing further off the background also helps here, because a slightly defocused wall reads as more uniform than a sharp one.

What not to do is replace the background in software. The United States tells applicants not to change the photo “using computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence”. Australia is blunter still and prohibits retouching “of any kind (including removal of background, moles, wrinkles or scars)”. A great many phone apps advertising instant passport photos do background replacement by default, sometimes without saying so.

When to pay a photographer

Sometimes the answer is that you cannot do this at home at all, and it is worth knowing that before you spend an afternoon on it.

Canada is the clearest case. Its requirement is that the photo be taken in person by a commercial photographer or photo studio, printed professionally, with the studio’s name and full address and the date the photo was taken written or stamped on the back. No amount of technique at home produces that.

Head coverings and medical exemptions are a second case, and the difficulty is not photographic. In the United States a religious head covering needs a signed statement saying it is religious attire worn daily in public, and a medical one needs a signed doctor’s statement; glasses that cannot be removed for medical reasons need a signed note from a doctor. The photograph is the easy half of that.

Infants are the case where the received wisdom is wrong. Both the American and British authorities describe, in some detail, how to do it at home. The United States suggests laying the child on a plain white or off-white sheet, or covering a car seat with the sheet, and notes that a baby’s eyes need not be entirely open. Britain says children under one should lie on a plain light-coloured sheet photographed from above, that you may support the head with a hand as long as the hand is not visible, that no toys or dummies may appear, and that children under six need not look directly at the camera or hold a plain expression. It is fiddly rather than impossible.

Beyond those, the honest decision rule is arithmetic on your own patience. A studio visit costs money once. A rejection costs weeks, and if you have already been rejected twice, the third attempt is not where the saving is.

Everything above is about getting the photograph right before any software touches it, because no tool recovers a picture taken under a ceiling light with your back against the wall. Once the shot is good, the mechanical part — crop to the country’s proportion, resize to the exact pixels, compress under the byte ceiling — is where a tool genuinely helps. Filestay’s US 2×2 preset does that sequence in one pass, in the browser, without the photograph leaving your device. For a picture of your own face attached to an identity document, that is a property worth having.