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

Getting the photo right before you open the tool

Almost every rejection comes from the photograph itself rather than the file. Software can fix dimensions and file size; it cannot fix a shadow on the wall behind you.

Stand about half a metre in front of a plain, light-coloured wall, and have the camera about 1.5 metres away — far enough that the lens does not distort your face, which is why selfies at arm's length so often look subtly wrong. Face the camera squarely, keep a neutral expression with your mouth closed, and make sure both eyes are open and clearly visible. Use soft, even light from the front: a window on an overcast day is close to ideal, and an overhead ceiling light is close to the worst, because it drops shadows into your eye sockets.

Take several. Then come back here, pick the best one, and the framing, the dimensions and the file-size budget are handled for you.

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.

Printing versus uploading

These are different requirements and it is easy to satisfy one while failing the other. An upload needs pixels and a byte budget; a printed photo needs millimetres and the right paper. The link between them is DPI, and the presets here output at the resolution each authority specifies, so a printed sheet comes out at true physical size.

When you print, set the printer to 100% scale. Every printer driver defaults to something like "fit to page" or "shrink to printable area", which reduces everything by a few percent — and a photo that is 3% too small is a photo that gets handed back.