Studios charge real money for a photo you can take on your phone in five minutes. The catch: passport offices reject sloppy photos. Follow the rules below and yours will pass.
Know your target size
The two most common standards: 35 × 45 mm (most countries, including the EU, UK and India) and 2 × 2 inches / 51 × 51 mm (US). Within the frame, the face usually must occupy 70–80% of the height, eyes in the upper half. Our Passport Photo Maker has both presets with zoom and vertical-offset controls so you can match the framing exactly.
Shooting it right
- Background: plain white or light grey wall, no shadows. Stand half a metre in front of the wall so your shadow falls out of frame.
- Light from the front: face a window. Side light creates the facial shadows that get photos rejected.
- Camera at eye level, 1.5–2 m away — closer distorts your features.
- Neutral expression, mouth closed, eyes open, looking straight at the lens. No glasses glare (best: no glasses), no hair across the eyes, no heavy filters — actually, no filters at all.
Crop to any passport size and get a 4×6" print sheet with multiple copies — free, in your browser.
Open Passport Photo MakerThe rejection list
- Shadows on the face or background
- Head tilted or turned
- Smiling broadly or eyes partly closed
- Background objects, patterned walls
- Over-edited skin (beauty filters are a common rejection cause now)
- Wrong head size within the frame
Printing at photo quality
Print shops and home printers work from a standard 4 × 6 inch sheet at 300 DPI. Our tool tiles as many copies of your photo as fit onto one sheet — typically 6–8 — so a single cheap print gives you spares. If a form asks for a specific DPI on the digital file, set it with the DPI Converter; for online applications with a file-size cap, use the Image Size Reducer to hit "under 100 KB" without visible quality loss.
Finally: check your country's official specification before submitting — a few (Canada, for instance) have unusual sizes. The framing rules above hold almost everywhere.