Passport photos. Checked, not changed.
Upload a photograph and we measure it against the requirements for your document and for the way you are submitting it — because a US passport photo on a paper form and the same photograph uploaded to the online renewal service are governed by two different pages, with two different rule sets. You get a result rule by rule, in the authority's own words, including the rules we could not check.
We do not retouch, crop out or regenerate anything. We tell you what is wrong so you can retake it, and the retake costs nothing to check.
Checking is free and needs no account. The full service is one payment of $9.90 USD, for one person and one document.
Payments are in test mode. No order on this site can be paid for with a real card yet, so nothing here is on sale today. Every check on the free side of the line works exactly as described.
Choose your document, and how you are sending it
This is the first question, not a detail. The rules below come from two separate State Department pages and we never mix them.
US passport (paper form)
For form DS-11 or DS-82 — the application you print, sign and hand in or post. What you submit is a photograph on paper.
What the State Department publishes for this route
- Printed at 2 × 2 inches (51 × 51 mm)
- Head 25–35 mm, measured from the chin to the top of the head
- Printed on matte or glossy photo-quality paper
- 1 photo, taken in the last 6 months
What it does not publish: No pixel dimensions, aspect ratio, file format, file size, colour space or numeric DPI is published for the paper application — the artefact you submit is a print.
That link opens a new check. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and you see the price before you are asked for anything.
Source: U.S. Department of State — Passport Photos (paper application)(opens in a new tab)
US passport (renew online)
For renewing online through the State Department. It only accepts online renewals from applicants aged 25 or older, and what you submit is a file.
What the State Department publishes for this route
- File formats: JPG or JPEG, PNG, HEIC, HEIF
- File size between 54 KB and 10 MB
- Taken in the last 6 months
- The State Department crops the photo itself, inside its own application
What it does not publish: State publishes no pixel dimensions, aspect ratio, colour space or DPI for the online renewal upload. We do not check against numbers it has not published.
That link opens a new check. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and you see the price before you are asked for anything.
Source: U.S. Department of State — Uploading a Digital Photo (online renewal)(opens in a new tab)
Those are the only two documents we support. We would rather name the two we have read properly than list fifty we have not.
How it works
Four steps. The boundary is at the end of step four: we check and prepare, you submit.
Step 1
Pick the document and the route
Paper form, or online renewal. Everything after this — the checks that run, the rules we quote, the files you end up with — follows from that one choice.
Step 2
Send us a photograph
Take one with a phone or a camera, or upload one you already have. Your file goes to a private store, never to a public address, and the checks run on the server.
Step 3
Read what we found, free
Every rule is listed as passed, failed, needs a person to look, or not checked — with what we measured and the authority's wording. If something is wrong, retake and check again for nothing.
Step 4
Pay only if you want the full service
A reviewer looks at the things software cannot judge, and you get your files and a checklist. Then you submit the application yourself — we never do that part.
We do not quote a turnaround time. Nothing has been delivered to a customer yet, so any number we printed here would be a guess dressed up as a promise.
What is free, and what $9.90 pays for
The line between the two is drawn here and nowhere else. Nothing below the free list is hidden behind the payment, and nothing above it is charged for.
The check
Free, no accountRuns on every photograph you send, as many times as you like. You see the whole result before you decide anything.
What it measures
- The real file format, read from the bytes rather than from the file name
- Whether the file can be opened at all, and whether it is safe to open
- File size against the band the authority publishes for your route
- Pixel dimensions and aspect ratio, reported as measurements
- Whether the photograph is actually in colour
- Exposure, clipped highlights and crushed shadows
- Sharpness — whether the photograph is blurry, grainy or pixelated
- Background evenness, plainness and colour
- How old the photograph is, where the file still carries that information
- Traces of editing software left behind in the file
What it cannot do
- There is no face detector in this release. Head height, head count, head tilt and centring come back as "not checked" — a measurement we did not take is never reported as a pass.
- We cannot open HEIC or HEIF files. The State Department accepts them for online renewal; our decoders handle JPEG and PNG. A HEIC upload is reported as a file we could not read, with instructions for getting a JPEG out of your phone, and never as a problem with the photograph itself.
- Expression, glasses, head coverings, clothing and "is this really an unedited photograph of you" are human judgements. They are listed as human-review items with the authority's own wording beside them.
- The full-resolution file is not served before payment. The free result is an on-screen report and a screen-resolution preview.
The full service
$9.90One payment, in USD, for one person and one document. No subscription, and no account needed to buy. Taxes are worked out at checkout and shown before you pay.
On top of the free check, you get
- A reviewer looks at your photograph for the things software cannot judge: expression, glasses, head coverings, clothing, and whether it looks like an unedited photograph.
- A free retake under the same order if the reviewer asks for one. You are not charged twice for one application.
- The full written report, and your downloads. Nothing is watermarked.
Files for US passport (paper form)
- Your original photo. Exactly the file you uploaded, unchanged, so you always have the untouched original.
- Print-ready 2×2 inch photo. Your photo cropped to the 2×2 inch frame with the head sized between 25 and 35 mm, ready to print on photo paper.
- 4×6 inch print sheet. Six copies of the 2×2 photo laid out on a 4×6 inch sheet, so a one-hour print booth costs you a few cents.
- Printing and submission checklist. What paper to use, what to check before you print, and the exact wording of the rules your photo was measured against.
Files for US passport (renew online)
- Your original photo, unchanged. Byte-for-byte the file you uploaded. This is what you upload to the State Department — their application does the cropping.
- Your checked report. Every rule we measured, what we found, and which rules only a person can judge — with the State Department’s own wording next to each one.
- Crop-and-upload walkthrough. How to position your photo in the State Department’s own crop tool, so you do not have to guess what "head and shoulders centred" means.
Test mode. The payment provider is connected in test mode only. No card can be charged, so no order can actually be bought today. The price is stated here so it is stated before anyone uploads anything.
What we do not do
This list is longer than most sites in this market would print. It is the part of the product that decides whether the rest is worth anything.
We do not change your photograph
No retouching, no background replacement, no brightening, no straightening, and nothing generated by a model. The State Department says to submit the original and says it checks for photographs made with artificial intelligence. When something is wrong, the fix is a retake, and we tell you exactly what to change.
For US passport (renew online) we do not even crop: you get your original file back byte for byte, because State asks for the original and crops it inside its own application.
For US passport (paper form) we lay your photograph out at the printed size and hand you a sheet to print. Laying a photograph out is not editing it, and you keep the untouched original either way.
We do not submit anything for you
We are an independent service, not an agent, not a government site and not affiliated with the U.S. Department of State. We never file an application, never contact an agency on your behalf and never ask for the rest of your application. You submit; we only get the photograph right beforehand.
We do not promise your photo will be accepted
Nobody selling you a passport photo can promise that, and a site that does is telling you something it has no way to know. A State Department employee reviews the photograph after you apply, and that decision is theirs. What we can tell you is precisely which published rules your photograph meets, which it does not, and which we did not check.
We do not make you sign up first
There is no account before payment. You can check a photograph, read the whole report and walk away without giving us an email address. You enter one at the payment step so we can send you your files, and even then an account is optional.
About 600 × 600, 1200 × 1200, sRGB, 240 kB, 300 ppi and the 28–35 mm eye height
Those numbers are everywhere, and they are not US passport requirements. They come from the US visa photo programme, which is a different set of pages for a different document. The State Department publishes no pixel dimensions, no aspect ratio, no colour space and no numeric DPI for either passport route, and no eye-height measurement at all. We do not check your photograph against numbers the authority has not published, and we say so on the report rather than quietly inventing a threshold.
Where those figures actually come from: U.S. Department of State — Digital Image Requirements (US visas)(opens in a new tab).
See every standard we check against, its source and the date a person last read it
What happens to your photograph
A passport photograph is a picture of your face. It is treated as such here.
- It is stored in a private bucket with an unguessable key. There is no public URL for your photograph, and downloads are authorised per request.
- It is never used to train a model and never run through face recognition. We measure pixels and file bytes; we do not try to identify you.
- If you never pay, the photographs for that order are deleted 24 hours later. If you do pay, they are kept for 30 days so you can come back for the files, then deleted.
- You can ask us to delete them sooner. Deleting the images does not delete the record that an order existed — we keep that for accounting, and we would rather say so than imply a clean sweep.
Read this before you take the photograph
Most rejected photographs fail on something that was decided before the shutter: the wall behind you, the light on your face, who was holding the camera. These are free to read and you do not have to buy anything to use them.
US passport photo requirements, by application route
The two rule sets side by side, including where they genuinely disagree — expression, glasses, uniforms, framing — and which widely-quoted numbers belong to the visa programme.
How to take a passport photo at home
Distance, light, background and who holds the camera — with a note on what the State Department says about this and what it simply does not address.
Why passport photos are rejected, and what to do next
Built from the authority's own rejection language, with a retake instruction for each cause rather than an edit.
How to print a 2 × 2 inch passport photo
Paper, sheet layout and the difference between 4 × 6 in and 10 × 15 cm — plus why there is no official DPI number to hit.
Lay out a 2 × 2 inch photo and measure the head Help and common questions About IDPhoto.now