DV Lottery (Green Card) — 600×600 px photo maker

The Diversity Visa entry is the one application here where a machine inspects your photograph before any person does. Its dimensions are a single value, not a range — exactly 600 by 600 pixels — and the file must be a 24-bit colour JPEG of 240 KB or less.

How much of the frame the head has to fill

With the frame fixed at 600 pixels tall the band converts cleanly: 300 pixels of head at the low end, 414 at the high, chin to crown. What remains at the tight end is 186 pixels, split between the space above your hair and the space below your chin. Since the first check made on the file is arithmetic, measure the crop in pixels before exporting.

What gets this one sent back

• A scanner set to greyscale gives a file that looks normal and fails anyway: 24-bit colour is verified, and black and white does not pass.
• 600×600 means exactly that. A resize that rounds to 599, or quietly adds a border, gives an upload the form refuses.
• The 240 KB ceiling is generous — about two-thirds of a byte per pixel — so heavy compression is rarely needed.

Half a metre clear of the wall so your shadow falls behind you, camera at about 1.5 metres so the lens does not widen your nose, soft light from the front. Take several.

What the DV entry system actually checks

The Electronic Diversity Visa entry form validates your photo the moment you upload it, before any person reviews the entry. It checks that the image is exactly 600 by 600 pixels, that the file is a JPEG, that it is 24-bit colour rather than greyscale, and that it is no larger than 240 KB. Fail any of those and the upload is refused.

Beyond the automated checks, a reviewer later looks for the things a validator cannot measure: a plain light background with no shadows, a head that fills the right proportion of the frame, a neutral expression, no glasses, no head covering except for religious reasons, and a photograph taken within the last six months. Reusing a photo from a previous year's entry is explicitly disqualifying.

This tool enforces the four technical requirements exactly — the target-size search compresses the JPEG until it fits under 240 KB while keeping quality as high as the budget allows. The rest is down to how you take the photo.

Timing

Registration for the Diversity Visa programme normally opens in the autumn and stays open for about a month. There is no late window and no appeal for a rejected photo, so it is worth preparing the image before registration opens rather than during the final days, when the entry site is at its busiest.

Print and upload are two different specs

2×2 in is a physical instruction; 600×600 pixels is what it becomes at 300 dpi. The head band follows the same conversion — 50–69% of 2 in is 1.00–1.38 in, or 300–414 pixels in the exported file.

The upload adds a third constraint the print does not have: a byte budget. United States asks for 600×600 px as JPG, no larger than 240 KB. A file that satisfies the millimetres and fails the kilobytes is refused by the form before anyone reads the application, so the size search runs on every export here.

Print at 100%, not "fit to page" — the default shrink is invisible to you and measurable to whoever checks it.