Test environment. Payments here run in test mode and no real money is taken. Nothing bought here is reviewed or delivered for real, and uploaded photos are deleted within 30 days at the latest. There is no live version of this service yet, and the support mailbox is not monitored.
IDPhoto.now Check my photo

How to print a 2 x 2 inch passport photo

This page is only for the paper route. If you are renewing your US passport online, you upload a file and nothing is printed at all — the State Department does not publish a print size, a head size or a paper type for that route, and it explicitly tells you not to photograph or scan a printed photo to make your file. Go to photo for renewing a US passport online instead.

If you are applying on form DS-11 or renewing by mail on DS-82, the thing the State Department inspects is a physical print. That changes what can go wrong: paper, scale and the ruler matter more than pixels, and the most common way to ruin a correct photo is to let a print lab resize your sheet without telling you.

What State actually publishes about the print

Five rules, all from travel.state.gov — Passport Photos, quoted rather than paraphrased:

  • “The correct printed size of a passport photo is 2 x 2 inches (51 x 51 mm).”
  • “The size of your head in the printed photo must be between 1 -1 3/8 inches (25 - 35 mm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head.”
  • “Print your photo on matte or glossy photo-quality paper.”
  • “Submit a high-resolution color photo that is not blurry, grainy, or pixelated. The photo should not have visible printer dots.”
  • “Do not submit photocopies or digitally scanned photos.” “Do not submit a damaged photo with holes, creases, or smudges.”

Plus the count and the age, from the same page’s opening list: “Submit 1 color photo taken in the last 6 months.” The DS-11 and DS-82 instruction sheets (both revision 04-2025) carry the same bullets — DS-11 (PDF) and DS-82 (PDF) — including “Head must be 1-1 3/8 inches from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head” and “Printed on matte or glossy photo quality paper”.

Note what is not in that list: no resolution in pixels, no dots per inch, no colour profile, no border rule, no instruction about how to cut it out. We come back to each absence below rather than filling it in.

The paper

“Matte or glossy photo-quality paper” is the whole of the published rule, and it rules out more than people expect.

  • Ordinary office paper is not photo paper. Even at the best print setting, it absorbs ink, dulls the colour and shows the dot pattern State asks you to avoid.
  • Matte and glossy are both acceptable. One of State’s acceptable examples reads: “The photo is sharp without any visible pixels or printer dots. The photo is printed on glossy or matte quality paper.” Choose whichever your printer handles better. Textured, pearl, canvas and “lustre with a pattern” finishes are not named, and a texture in the surface risks reading as texture in the photo.
  • No photocopies. Copying a good print produces a worse one and it is refused by name.
  • No scans. Scanning a print and reprinting it is the same failure with an extra step. State refuses “digitally scanned photos”, and on the online route it says directly: “Avoid scanning or taking a picture of a printed photo since this may lower the photo quality.”
  • Keep the print clean and flat. Holes, creases and smudges are listed. Handle it by the edges, and do not fold the envelope across it.

Two inches is a physical measurement

This is the idea the whole page rests on. A screen has no inches: the same image is one size on a phone and another on a monitor. The rule is about the piece of paper in the envelope. Two inches is 50.8 mm — State rounds the pair to 51 x 51 mm — and the head inside it must be between 25 and 35 mm from chin to crown, which is roughly half to two-thirds of the height of the square.

The consequence is that any scaling between your file and the paper changes the answer. Scale a correct layout down by a few per cent and the square is no longer 2 inches, and the head is no longer in the band. Which brings us to sheet sizes.

4 x 6 inches and 10 x 15 cm are not the same sheet

Both are sold as “the standard photo print”. They are close, they are not equal, and the difference is enough to matter.

SheetShort edgeLong edgeWhole 2 x 2 in photos that fit
4 x 6 inches101.6 mm152.4 mmExactly 6, in a 3 x 2 grid, with no margin at all
10 x 15 cm100 mm150 mm2, side by side along the long edge — a second row does not fit

The arithmetic below is ours, not State’s, and you can check it. Three 2-inch squares occupy 152.4 mm, which is the whole long edge of a 4 x 6 sheet and 2.4 mm more than a 10 x 15 cm sheet has. Two squares occupy 101.6 mm, the whole short edge of a 4 x 6 and 1.6 mm more than a 10 x 15 cm sheet has. So six photos fill a 4 x 6 sheet perfectly and edge to edge, while a 10 x 15 cm sheet is short on both edges and loses a whole column and a whole row: at true size it holds two.

That is the part worth pausing on. A 1.6 mm difference costs you two-thirds of the photos on the sheet, because the 4 x 6 layout has no spare millimetre anywhere to give up.

Why this ruins photos silently

A 4 x 6 inch sheet and a 10 x 15 cm sheet have the same proportions: 101.6 ÷ 100 and 152.4 ÷ 150 are both 1.016. Because the shapes match, no software warns you. A print lab handed a 4 x 6 layout and loaded with 10 x 15 cm paper will simply scale it to fit, by a factor of 0.984. Uniformly. Quietly.

  • Your 50.8 mm square comes out at 50.0 mm — about 1.97 inches.
  • A head measured at exactly 25 mm comes out at 24.6 mm, which is under State’s published minimum.
  • A head at 35 mm comes out at 34.4 mm, which still passes. The risk is all at the bottom of the band.

So: lay out for the paper you will actually print on, tell the lab which paper that is, and ask for the sheet printed at actual size with no scaling and no auto-crop. If 10 x 15 cm is all you can get, lay out two photos at true size on a 100 x 150 mm canvas and accept the smaller yield. Two photos at the right size beat six at the wrong one, and you only submit one.

Our 2 x 2 inch layout tool does this arithmetic in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and shows the millimetres it is working in so you can check them against a ruler.

Printing at home

Home printing gives you complete control of the scale, which is the one thing that usually goes wrong elsewhere. It costs you a sheet of photo paper and some attention to the print dialogue.

  1. Load photo paper, and tell the printer it is photo paper. Most drivers change ink volume and drying behaviour based on the media setting; leaving it on “plain paper” is what produces visible dots on glossy stock.
  2. Turn off every kind of scaling. Look for “Scale to fit”, “Fit to page”, “Shrink oversized pages” or a percentage box, and set it to actual size or 100%. This is the single most important click on this page.
  3. Decide about borderless deliberately. Six 2 x 2 photos fill a 4 x 6 sheet with zero margin, so six-up only works if your printer can print to the edge. A printer that cannot will either clip the outer photos or shrink the whole sheet to fit its printable area — and shrinking is the failure this page is about. If yours cannot do borderless, put two photos at true size on the sheet, inside the margin, and print a second sheet if you want spares.
  4. Use the highest print quality. State’s tip: “Use a higher quality printer ink, paper, or print setting, or increase printer’s resolution (dots per inch (DPI) setting). Use glossy or matte photo paper.”
  5. Print one test sheet and measure it before you print more. On plain paper if you like — you are measuring geometry, not judging colour.
  6. Let it dry. Glossy inkjet prints smudge while wet, and smudges are a listed rejection cause.

Using a print shop or a photo kiosk

A print counter gives you proper photographic paper and a machine that is calibrated, which is hard to beat at home. If you do not already own photo paper, a single 4 x 6 print is usually the cheaper route as well — though prices vary and we are not going to quote you one.

Three things to ask for, in this order:

  • Actual size, no scaling, no “fit to paper”. Say the sheet is already laid out and must not be resized. Confirm the paper is 4 x 6 inches if your layout is, and 10 x 15 cm if it is not.
  • No auto-crop. Kiosks routinely crop a print to fill the paper. On a sheet with no margin that clips the outer photos.
  • Auto-enhancement off, if the machine lets you. Automatic colour, contrast and “face beautify” corrections are common defaults. We want to be careful here: State does not address print-kiosk enhancement anywhere we could find. What it does publish is “Submit the original, unchanged photo” and a ban on changing the photo with software or artificial intelligence. We would rather not find out whether a machine’s colour correction counts, so we turn it off where we can and suggest you do the same.

Then measure the print before you leave, if you can. It is much easier to ask for a reprint at the counter than from home.

DPI: State publishes no number

People expect a resolution requirement here, usually “300 DPI”. For US passport photos there is not one. The only appearance of dots per inch on the passport photos page is inside a tip about your printer’s settings: “increase printer’s resolution (dots per inch (DPI) setting)”. That is advice about a printer control, not a threshold your file has to meet.

The 300 figure is real, but it belongs to the US visa programme, on travel.state.gov — Digital Image Requirements, where the instruction for scanning an existing printed photo is “Scanned at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch (12 pixels per millimeter)”. The same visa pages are where 600 x 600 pixels, 1200 x 1200 pixels, sRGB and the 240 kB ceiling come from. A visa is a different document with a different specification, and none of those numbers govern a passport photo.

You can still do the arithmetic for your own reassurance: the pixels along one edge of your square crop, divided by 2 inches, is the dots per inch that edge will be printed at. It is a measurement, and State publishes no threshold to compare it with. The published test is the visible one — “not blurry, grainy, or pixelated”, and “should not have visible printer dots”. Look at the print.

Checking the print with a ruler

Do this every time, including when a shop did the printing. Use a millimetre ruler with a square end — a steel rule or a good plastic one, not a fabric tape and not the edge of a phone app.

  1. Measure the square, both ways. Each side should read 51 mm, which is the rounding State publishes for 2 inches (50.8 mm). A reading of 50 mm means something scaled your sheet by about 1.6% — almost certainly a 4 x 6 layout printed on 10 x 15 cm paper.
  2. Measure chin to the top of the head. It must fall between 25 and 35 mm. State’s wording is “from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head”; it does not further define how tall hair is treated, beyond saying your hair may extend past the edges of the photo as long as your entire head is shown and is the appropriate size. Measure to the top of the head as it appears.
  3. Watch the inch wording. The requirement bullet says 1 -1 3/8 inches and four photo tips on the same page say 1 to 1.4 inches. 1 3/8 in is 34.9 mm and 1.4 in is 35.6 mm. The millimetre pair is identical in both places and the forms use 1-1 3/8, so measure the millimetres: 25 to 35 mm.
  4. Check the head is centred and that the whole head is inside the frame.
  5. Look at the surface in daylight. No visible dot pattern, no banding, no scuffs, no creases.

If the square measures right and the head does not, the crop is wrong rather than the printing — that is a layout change, not a printer setting.

Cutting them out, and attaching one

State publishes no rule about how you cut the photos. It does say the print must not be damaged, so the practical advice is simple: use a guillotine or a sharp blade against a steel rule rather than scissors, cut on the line and not inside it, keep the corners square, and handle the print by its edges.

You submit one photo. DS-11 and DS-82 both print a photo template box on application page 1, and DS-82 adds a handling instruction worth reading before you reach for a stapler: “USE CAUTION WHEN STAPLING YOUR PHOTO: Use 4 staples vertically in the corners as close to the outer edges as possible. Do not bend the photo.” Keep the spare copies from the sheet. If a reviewer asks for another photograph, you will be glad you already have one cut to size from the same print.

What we do, and what we do not

On the paper route we check your photo against the rules quoted above and give you a print-ready sheet at the published size, plus a checklist for the print itself. Producing that sheet is geometry: your photograph is scaled uniformly to the 2 x 2 inch frame and copies of it are placed on the page. Nothing in the picture is touched. We do not retouch, filter, relight, sharpen, replace a background or generate anything; we never stretch or squash the image to make it fit, because State says “Do not stretch or compress your image to resize it”; and your original file comes back to you unchanged alongside the sheet, so you always hold the untouched version.

The price is 9.90 USD — one payment, for one person and one document. The pre-check on the photo checker is free and needs no account, and the 2 x 2 layout tool runs entirely in your browser.

Payments are in test mode. No order on this site can be paid for real yet, so nothing here can take your money today. The free tools work.

And the limit, which is the same on every page of this site: a print that measures correctly satisfies State’s published size rule and nothing else. Background, lighting, expression, glasses, head coverings, the six-month age limit and the ban on edited photos all still apply, and an employee at the State Department decides whether your photograph is acceptable. We cannot make that decision for them, and neither can anybody else selling you a photo.

Next

Sources

Every quotation above was read on 16 September 2026. The passport photos page footer then read “Last Updated: March 24, 2026”; the online renewal photo page, “Last Updated: May 04, 2026”. The DS-11 and DS-82 PDFs were revision 04-2025. Millimetre conversions and the sheet-size arithmetic are ours and are marked as such in the text.