A passport photo is a measurement
50 × 60 mm, head 42–48 mm, plain white behind. The frame below is the photo itself: move the picture inside it until the crown and the chin sit in the dashed bands, then download the exact pixel size or a sheet of copies for the printer.
The Passport and ID Photo Maker prepares a passport, visa or ID photo at the exact millimetre size an authority asks for, with a zoom control and a print sheet of several copies on one page. A 35 × 45 mm photo at 300 dpi is 413 × 531 pixels.
How it works
Add the photo
Open a plain portrait with the face clearly visible.
Fit the document size
Pick passport, visa or ID and line the head up with the guide.
Save or print
Download the exact pixel size, or a sheet with several copies for printing.
Seven reasons the counter sends you back
Almost nobody is refused because the photograph is ugly. People are refused because the head is two millimetres too small, because one side of the background is grey, or because the file was sent through a chat app and printed soft. Every one of those is a measuring problem, and every one is cheaper to fix before you queue than after.
- check_circleThe head is too small or too large for the frame - the face should fill 70 to 80 percent of the height
- check_circleThe background is not plain: a doorframe, a shadow on one side, a coloured wall
- check_circleThe head is tilted or turned, even slightly, or one shoulder sits higher
- check_circleThe photo is older than six months, or shows a different haircut than the person in front of the clerk
- check_circleThe face has been filtered, smoothed or reshaped by a beauty app
- check_circleGlare on the glasses, or the frame covers part of the eye
- check_circleThe print is soft because a 400-pixel crop was blown up to 35 mm
The same three photos, to scale
Draw the three boxes below at their real relative size and a pattern appears: the bigger the photo, the more of it the head has to fill. Turkey asks for 50 × 60 mm and a head of 42–48 mm; the Schengen area asks for 35 × 45 mm and 32–36 mm; the United States asks for 2 × 2 inches and 25–35 mm. In every case the crown and the chin land in narrow bands near the top and the bottom of the frame, and the bands are what the tool in this page draws over your picture.
That is also why a photo cropped for one country is almost never accepted by another: the frame ratio changes, and so does the head height. A 35 × 45 crop stretched to 50 × 60 makes the face longer than it is, and the clerk can see it.
Sizes people actually ask for
| Where | Photo size | Head height | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Türkiye (biometric ID, passport) | 50 × 60 mm | 42–48 mm | plain white, no shadow, last 6 months |
| Schengen / EU visa | 35 × 45 mm | 32–36 mm | light background, neutral expression |
| United States | 2 × 2 in (51 × 51 mm) | 25–35 mm | white background, no glasses |
| United Kingdom | 35 × 45 mm | 29–34 mm | plain light grey or cream, not pure white |
| Canada | 50 × 70 mm | 31–36 mm | white or light background, name and date on the back |
| China | 33 × 48 mm | 28–33 mm | white background, no head covering |
| India | 2 × 2 in (51 × 51 mm) | 25–35 mm | white background, both ears visible |
Two entries in that table are worth reading twice. The United Kingdom asks for a light grey or cream background rather than pure white, and Canada wants the photographer's name and the date on the back of one copy. Those are the details that survive a first glance and fail an inspection.
The three steps after the crop
A plain wall works if it is really plain: no doorframe, no picture, no shadow of the person standing in front of it. Stand about 40 cm away, because a body close to a wall still casts a soft shadow, and that shadow is the most common reason a home photo is refused.
For light, two sources at roughly 45 degrees to the face beat one lamp straight on. Mixed light - a window on one side and a bulb on the other - puts a colour cast on half the face, and a colour cast on a white wall reads as a grey background on paper. If the wall looks slightly blue or slightly yellow in the photo, the white balance is wrong, and that is fixable before printing.
Print at 100%, never "fit to page". On a home inkjet, photo paper of 180 to 250 g/m² in glossy or matte is enough; textured or canvas paper is not. The tool draws a hairline around every copy so you can cut with a craft knife and a steel ruler, which gives a cleaner edge than scissors and a steadier size.
After printing, measure one copy. A 35 × 45 mm photo must measure 35 × 45 mm, not 34 × 44. If the measurement is off by a millimetre, the printer margin setting is the culprit; if it is off by three, the paper size in the dialog is wrong.
Let the ink dry for a few minutes before stacking the copies. Inkjet prints still wet will smear against the next sheet, and a smeared corner is a rejected photo.
Exposure, white balance, dust spots and a straight crop are fine. Smoothing skin, whitening eyes, slimming a jaw or removing a permanent feature is not: a biometric photo has to match the face that walks up to the counter, and many authorities now check for edited images.
Beauty filters are the fastest way to a refusal, because they change the shape of the face and the size of the eyes rather than the light. A phone's default camera app often applies one without asking; shooting with a third-party camera that stores a plain JPEG avoids the problem.
A passport photo is not a portrait. It is a measurement that happens to have a face in it.
Before you stand in the queue
Can I use a phone selfie?expand_more
Why does the tool ask me to zoom instead of just cropping?expand_more
Is 300 dpi enough for a passport photo?expand_more
Can I print the copies on A4 paper and cut them out?expand_more
Does it remove the background?expand_more
My country is not in the list. What then?expand_more
One photo, printed properly
Pick the country, line the head up with the bands, download the file and a sheet of copies.
fact_checkQuick facts
- A 35 × 45 mm photo at 300 dpi is 413 × 531 pixels — the arithmetic that most passport photo rules come down to.
- A print sheet puts several identical photos on one 10 × 15 cm page, so a single print gives you copies for several forms.
- JPEG splits the picture into 8×8 pixel blocks and stores a discrete cosine transform of each block, which is where its block-shaped artefacts come from.menu_bookITU-T
- JPEG has no alpha channel, so transparency always becomes white or black when a picture is saved as JPG.menu_bookITU-T
- An untagged image is assumed to be sRGB, so a picture in Display P3 looks duller once its profile is dropped.menu_bookInternational Color Consortium
helpQuestions people ask
What size is a passport photo?expand_more
What resolution should a passport photo be?expand_more
Can I take a passport photo with my phone?expand_more
hubWhat this page is about
- JPEGopen_in_new
A lossy still-image format standardised as ITU-T T.81 in 1992 and still the default format of most cameras and phones.
- ICC colour profileopen_in_new
A file that describes how the colours of an image map to a device, defined by the International Color Consortium.
- PDFopen_in_new
The Portable Document Format, standardised as ISO 32000 and documented by Adobe in the PDF 1.7 reference, that fixes the layout of a page.
library_booksOfficial sources cited on this page
Continue with the same file
Each of these opens what the tool above produces. Use “Use in another tool” under the result to carry the file over — it moves from tab to tab inside your browser, never to a server.
Switched-off tools are not listed here: only what works right now.