The form is open, the payment screen is waiting, and there is a photo on your phone that looks perfectly reasonable. Then the upload box tells you the image is the wrong shape. Or worse, nothing happens for six weeks and a letter arrives saying the photograph did not meet the standard.
Passport and visa photo sizes by country do not follow one global rule. They follow two dominant rules and about a dozen exceptions, and the exception that matters is whichever one belongs to the government reading your application. A Canadian passport photo is 50 by 70 millimetres. A Canadian visitor visa photo is 35 by 45. Same country, same person, different rectangle.
I built the table below to be the thing I wish existed when I was trying to work out whether a photo already sitting in a folder could be reused. It gives you dimensions in millimetres and inches, head height where the authority publishes a figure, background colour, and pixel dimensions at 300 dots per inch.
Read this next bit before you read the table. Photo requirements change, and they change without fanfare. Treat everything here as a starting point for a sanity check, then confirm the numbers on the official government page for your country and for your specific application type. A renewal, a first adult passport, a child passport and a visa can all carry slightly different rules within the same country.
The short answer
Most of the world uses 35 by 45 millimetres, which is 1.38 by 1.77 inches, or roughly 413 by 531 pixels at 300 dpi. That covers the United Kingdom, the Schengen area, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa, among many others.
The second big family is the 2 by 2 inch square, which is 51 by 51 millimetres or 600 by 600 pixels at 300 dpi. The United States uses it for passports and visas. India uses it for passport applications and e-visa uploads.
Then there are the outliers: Canada at 50 by 70 mm, China at 33 by 48 mm, the United Arab Emirates at 43 by 55 mm, Brazil at 50 by 70 mm and Turkey at 50 by 60 mm for biometric photos.
Size is the easy part. Head height inside the frame is where applications actually fail, and that number varies even between countries that share the same photo dimensions.
The table
Head height is measured from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head unless the authority says otherwise. Where I am not confident that a published head-height figure is current and official, the cell says so rather than guessing. Pixel figures are calculated at 300 dpi, which is the print resolution nearly every authority assumes.
| Country or scheme | Size (mm) | Size (inches) | Head height (chin to crown) | Background | Pixels at 300 dpi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States (passport and visa) | 51 x 51 | 2.0 x 2.0 | 25 to 35 mm (1 to 1 3/8 in) | Plain white or off-white | 600 x 600 |
| United Kingdom (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | 29 to 34 mm | Plain light grey or cream | 413 x 531 |
| Schengen visa | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | About 70 to 80% of frame height, so roughly 32 to 36 mm | Plain light, uniform | 413 x 531 |
| Canada (passport) | 50 x 70 | 1.97 x 2.76 | 31 to 36 mm | Plain white | 591 x 827 |
| Canada (visa and PR) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | 31 to 36 mm | Plain white | 413 x 531 |
| Australia (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | 32 to 36 mm | Plain light colour | 413 x 531 |
| New Zealand (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | 32 to 36 mm | Plain light colour | 413 x 531 |
| India (passport and e-visa) | 51 x 51 | 2.0 x 2.0 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 600 x 600 |
| China (passport and visa) | 33 x 48 | 1.30 x 1.89 | 28 to 33 mm, head width 15 to 22 mm | Plain white | 390 x 567 |
| Japan (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | 32 to 36 mm, with 2 to 6 mm above the head | Plain, no pattern or shadow | 413 x 531 |
| Brazil (passport) | 50 x 70 | 1.97 x 2.76 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 591 x 827 |
| South Africa (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | Check official guidance | Plain white or light | 413 x 531 |
| United Arab Emirates (visa) | 43 x 55 | 1.69 x 2.17 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 508 x 650 |
| Nigeria (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 413 x 531 |
| Pakistan (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 413 x 531 |
| Singapore (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 413 x 531 |
| South Korea (passport) | 35 x 45 | 1.38 x 1.77 | Check official guidance | Plain white or light | 413 x 531 |
| Turkey (visa and residence) | 50 x 60 | 1.97 x 2.36 | Check official guidance | Plain white | 591 x 709 |
Two notes on using that table. Nigeria and Pakistan both run enrolment centres where biometrics are captured on site for many applicants, so the printed photo requirement may only apply to certain routes. Singapore’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority publishes a separate digital specification, 400 by 514 pixels and a file no larger than 60 KB, which is smaller than the 300 dpi print figure. Where a country runs both routes, read the one you are actually using.
The two families, and why they exist
Almost every format in that table descends from one of two decisions.
The first is ICAO Doc 9303, the International Civil Aviation Organization specification for machine readable travel documents, together with ISO/IEC 19794-5, which defines how a face image should be captured for biometric use. Neither document mandates 35 by 45 millimetres as such. What they do is define proportions: how much of the frame the head should occupy, how the eyes should sit, how the lighting should behave. European passport offices settled on 35 by 45 as the print size that satisfies those proportions comfortably, and most of the world followed because it made document readers interoperable.
The second is the American 2 by 2 inch square, which predates the biometric era and survives because the US passport system standardised on it decades ago and never had a reason to change. India adopted the same square for passport applications and e-visa uploads, which is why an Indian applicant and an American applicant can, in principle, use the same crop.
Everything else is a local decision that stuck. Canada’s 50 by 70 is a taller rectangle that leaves more room above the head. China’s 33 by 48 is narrower and taller than the European standard, which is why a 35x45 photo scaled to fit a Chinese visa slot almost always ends up with the head too wide. The UAE’s 43 by 55 sits between the two families and matches nothing else.
Most guides tell you to just look up your country’s dimensions and crop to them. That is mostly right, and it is also the reason people get rejected, because the dimensions are the constraint that software enforces automatically and the head height is the constraint that a human or a face-detection algorithm enforces later.
Head height is the requirement people actually miss
Here is the thing that makes this genuinely confusing: two countries can both use 35 by 45 millimetres and still want different head sizes inside it.
The United Kingdom asks for 29 to 34 mm from chin to crown. Australia and Japan ask for 32 to 36 mm. Those ranges overlap, but not completely. A photo with a 30 mm head is comfortably inside the UK range and outside the Australian one. Same rectangle, same face, different answer.
Look at what that means as a proportion of frame height:
- US 2x2: head occupies 49% to 69% of the 51 mm height
- UK 35x45: head occupies 64% to 76% of the 45 mm height
- Japan and Australia 35x45: head occupies 71% to 80%
- Canada 50x70: head occupies 44% to 51% of the 70 mm height
- China 33x48: head occupies 58% to 69% of the 48 mm height
The Canadian figure surprises people. A Canadian passport photo has a lot of empty space above and below the head compared with a European one, because the print is 70 mm tall and the head is capped at 36 mm. If you crop a Canadian photo the way you would crop a British one, the head will be far too large.
How head height is measured
Chin to crown means the vertical distance from the lowest point of the chin, with the mouth closed and the jaw relaxed, to the highest point of the skull. Not the highest point of the hairstyle.
That distinction causes a lot of arguments. If you have a large volume of curly hair, an updo, or hair that has been backcombed, the measurement is generally taken to the top of the head rather than the top of the hair. Practically, this means volumnous hair does not push you out of range on head height, but it can still cause a problem if it crosses the top edge of the frame, because most authorities want the whole head visible with a small margin above it. Japan publishes that margin explicitly at 2 to 6 mm.
A religious head covering is treated as part of the head outline for framing purposes in most systems, and the face still has to be fully visible from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead. That rule is consistent enough across countries to rely on, though the paperwork some authorities want alongside it is not.
If you want the numbers pulled apart properly, along with eye-height rules and the pixel arithmetic for checking your own crop, that is the whole subject of the head size and crop guide.
Same country, different photo
This trips up more people than any dimension does. A country’s passport photo spec and its visa photo spec are separate documents maintained by separate departments, and they disagree more often than you would expect.
| Country | Passport photo | Visa or residence photo | Same crop? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canada | 50 x 70 mm | 35 x 45 mm | No |
| United States | 2 x 2 in | 2 x 2 in | Yes |
| India | 51 x 51 mm | 51 x 51 mm (e-visa) | Usually |
| China | 33 x 48 mm | 33 x 48 mm | Yes |
| United Kingdom | 35 x 45 mm print | Digital capture, min 600 x 750 px | Not directly |
| Schengen states | National passport, usually 35 x 45 mm | 35 x 45 mm | Usually |
The United Kingdom row needs a sentence of explanation. A UK visa application photo is normally captured at a visa application centre rather than supplied by you, so if someone tells you a UK visa photo is 35 by 45 mm, they are describing a print standard you will probably never print.
There is also a timing rule hiding behind all of this. The United States requires a photo taken within the last six months. Singapore asks for three. Several countries phrase it as “a current likeness” and leave the judgement to the officer. If you have gained or lost significant weight or grown a beard since the photo was taken, the six-month clock is not really the test. The test is whether you look like the photo.
From millimetres to pixels
The conversion is simple arithmetic, and doing it yourself is faster than searching for a per-country pixel figure that may not be current.
At 300 dpi there are 300 pixels per inch, and one inch is 25.4 millimetres. So:
Pixels per millimetre at 300 dpi = 300 / 25.4 = 11.811
Multiply any millimetre dimension by 11.811 and round to the nearest whole pixel. A 35 mm width becomes 35 x 11.811 = 413.4, so 413 pixels. A 45 mm height becomes 45 x 11.811 = 531.5, so 531 or 532 pixels depending on how your software rounds. Either is accepted in practice.
Going the other way, divide pixels by 11.811 to get millimetres. A 600 pixel dimension is 600 / 11.811 = 50.8 mm, which is exactly 2 inches. That is why the US square is sometimes written as 51 by 51 mm and sometimes as 50.8: it is a rounded conversion of an imperial measurement, not a metric spec.
If you need to convert other units quickly while you are working, the unit converter handles millimetres, inches and points without you having to remember 25.4.
Worked example: Amara’s Schengen visa photo
Say Amara is applying for a Schengen visa and has a portrait photo from her phone at 3024 by 4032 pixels. She needs 35 by 45 mm at 300 dpi, so a final file of 413 by 531 pixels, with her head occupying roughly 70 to 80% of the height.
First, the aspect ratio. The target is 35:45, which is 0.7778 wide for every 1 tall. Her original is 3024:4032, which is 0.75. Slightly narrower than she needs, so she cannot use the full height.
If she keeps the full width of 3024 pixels, the crop height must be 3024 / 0.7778 = 3888 pixels. That fits inside her 4032 pixel height with 144 pixels to spare. Good, she has room to move the crop box up or down to place her head correctly.
Now the head. The final image is 531 pixels tall. Aiming for the middle of the range, 75% of 531 is 398 pixels of head height in the exported file. Her crop is 3888 pixels tall and will be scaled down to 531, a reduction factor of 3888 / 531 = 7.32.
So in the original photo, her head needs to measure 398 x 7.32 = 2913 pixels from chin to crown inside the crop box.
She measures it. Chin sits at y = 3050 in the original, crown at y = 640. That gives a head height of 2410 pixels, which is smaller than the 2913 she wants. Her head is too small in the frame, which means the crop box is too big.
The fix is arithmetic, not a reshoot. She needs a crop height of 2410 / 0.75 = 3213 pixels to put her head at 75% of the frame. Width then becomes 3213 x 0.7778 = 2499 pixels. She sets a 2499 by 3213 crop box, positions it so the head is centred with a small margin above the crown, and exports at 413 by 531.
Final check: 2410 / 3213 = 75.0% of frame height, which lands at 398 pixels of a 531 pixel image, which is 398 / 11.811 = 33.7 mm. Inside the 32 to 36 mm range that the 70 to 80% rule implies. Done.
The formula worth memorising from that: crop height in pixels = measured head height in pixels divided by your target head fraction. It works for any format once you know the fraction.
Getting from a phone photo to a compliant file
Here is the sequence that works regardless of which country you are applying to.
- Open the official government page for your country and your application type. Write down four numbers: photo width, photo height, head height range, and background colour. If you are uploading rather than printing, note the minimum pixel dimensions and the maximum file size too.
- Check your source photo is big enough. Divide your target pixel height by the fraction of the frame your head should fill. If the head in your original is smaller than that, you will be enlarging, and enlarging costs sharpness.
- Strip the orientation data. Phone photos carry EXIF rotation flags that some upload checkers ignore, producing a sideways image. Running the file through the EXIF remover first removes that failure mode along with the location data.
- Lock the crop to the correct aspect ratio before you start moving it. Doing it the other way round means you will nudge the head off centre when you correct the shape.
- Measure the head inside the crop. Note the y coordinate of the chin and the y coordinate of the crown, subtract, and divide by the crop height. Compare that percentage to your target.
- Export at the exact pixel dimensions. Not close, exact. Automated checkers do reject 412 by 530.
- Compress only if there is a file size ceiling. Reduce quality in steps and stop the moment you are under it, because over-compression creates blocking artefacts around the eyes that face detection reads as noise.
- Compare against the spec one final time: width, height, head height, background, file size, format.
If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, the Passport Photo Maker has the country formats built in with the crop guides overlaid, so you drag the box until your chin and crown sit between the marker lines and export a file at the right pixel dimensions. It runs entirely in your browser, so the photo never leaves your device. For a plain size-and-crop job without country presets, the Passport Size Photo Maker does the same thing with a simpler interface.
What people get wrong about this
The failures cluster, and almost none of them are about the photo dimensions.
Stretching instead of cropping is the worst of them. Someone takes a 35x45 photo and scales it to 51x51 to reuse it for a US application, and the face gets wider. Face-detection software compares eye separation to face width and flags the distortion. Crop to the ratio, then scale.
Reusing a photo across two applications without checking the recency rule catches people out constantly. A photo from fourteen months ago that was accepted for a national ID card in March will fail a US passport application, because that one carries a hard six-month limit.
Background colour mismatch is the quiet one. A cream wall under warm indoor lighting renders as a distinctly yellow field that no authority describes as light grey or white. Colour temperature does more damage to background compliance than paint colour does.
Then there is the shadow. Not a background colour problem at all, but it gets logged as one, because a shadow behind the head makes a uniform background non-uniform. Standing further from the wall solves it.
Printing at the wrong resolution produces a photo that is dimensionally correct and visibly soft. A 413 by 531 pixel file printed at 35 by 45 mm gives you 300 dpi and looks fine. A 200 by 257 pixel file at the same physical size gives you about 145 dpi, and the counter staff will see it immediately.
Printing versus uploading
The two routes have different pressure points. Print submissions care about physical size, paper finish and trimming accuracy, and most authorities want photographic paper with a glossy or semi-gloss finish, so ordinary inkjet paper is rejected on sight. Digital submissions care about pixel count, file size, colour profile and format, and a file that is the right shape can still fail for being 12 MB, for being a PNG when JPEG was required, or for carrying a CMYK profile from a print workflow. Those failures and their fixes are covered properly in the digital specs guide.
One thing worth knowing: a file that satisfies the print spec at 300 dpi is often too small for the digital spec. The US wants at least 600 by 600 pixels, which matches the print figure exactly, but the UK wants at least 600 by 750 for digital while the 300 dpi print figure is only 413 by 531. Work to the larger of the two if there is any chance you will need both.
Before you submit
Confirm every number here against the official government page for your country and your application type. I mean that plainly, not as a legal formality. Passport offices revise photo guidance quietly, application routes get split into online and in-person variants with different rules, and a table on any website, including this one, is a snapshot of what was published when it was written.
The two things worth carrying away are these. First, the dimensions are the easy constraint and head height is the hard one, so measure your head as a percentage of frame height before you worry about anything else. Second, the arithmetic that converts between millimetres, inches and pixels is one multiplication: 11.811 pixels per millimetre at 300 dpi. Once you can do that in your head, any country’s spec becomes a crop box you can set in about thirty seconds, by hand or in the passport photo tool.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common passport photo size in the world?
35 by 45 millimetres is the most widely used passport photo size. It is the standard across the United Kingdom, the Schengen area, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and much of Africa and Asia. The main alternative is the 2 by 2 inch square used by the United States and India, with a handful of countries such as Canada, China and the United Arab Emirates using their own dimensions.
Is 35x45 mm the same as 2x2 inches?
No, and they are not interchangeable. 35 by 45 millimetres is 1.38 by 1.77 inches, a portrait rectangle. A 2 by 2 inch photo is 51 by 51 millimetres, a perfect square. Cropping a square out of a 35x45 photo cuts off the top of the head or the chin, and stretching one to fit the other distorts the face, which automated checkers detect. Crop to the correct ratio from your original file instead.
Can I use the same photo for a passport and a visa?
Sometimes, but check first. Canada uses 50 by 70 millimetres for passports and 35 by 45 millimetres for most visa and permanent residence applications. The United States uses 2 by 2 inches for both. Even where the dimensions match, the recency rule may differ, so a photo that is still valid for one application can be too old for another.
What size is a passport photo in pixels?
It depends on the print resolution. At 300 dots per inch, a 35 by 45 millimetre photo is about 413 by 531 pixels and a 2 by 2 inch photo is 600 by 600 pixels. Online submission systems often ask for more than the print minimum. The United States accepts 600 by 600 up to 1200 by 1200 pixels for digital passport applications, and the United Kingdom asks for at least 600 by 750.
Does the background have to be pure white?
Not everywhere. The United States, Canada, China, India and most Gulf states specify plain white or off-white. The United Kingdom asks for a plain light grey or cream background instead, and Australia and New Zealand ask for a plain light colour rather than white specifically. The consistent requirement is uniformity: no pattern, no gradient, no shadow behind the head.
How do I know if my country’s requirement has changed?
Go to the government page that handles your specific application, not a photo shop page or a summary table like this one. Passport offices update their guidance without announcement, and requirements often differ between a first application, a renewal, an in-person appointment and an online upload. Check the date on the page and read the section that matches your application type.
What to actually do
You now have the numbers for seventeen countries and schemes, the conversion factor that turns any of them into pixels, and the reason head height matters more than the rectangle around it. What you do not have, and cannot have from any third-party page, is certainty that a given figure is current today for your particular application.
So use this to plan the shot and set the crop, then open your government’s photo guidance and check the four numbers that matter: width, height, head height, background. If they match, submit. If they do not, the fix is almost always a different crop box on the same original file rather than a new photograph, and that takes about a minute.