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How to take a passport photo at home

You are allowed to do this. The U.S. Department of State lists “a friend or family member” alongside an acceptance facility and a commercial photo service as places to get a passport photo, and there is no photographer certification, studio stamp or photo code anywhere in the US passport process. What it takes is a plain wall, some distance, light from the front, and a phone whose clever features are switched off.

Before you start: which route are you on

Almost everything on this page applies to both routes, but two things do not. If you are filling in a paper form (DS-11 or DS-82), your photo ends up as a 2 x 2 inch (51 x 51 mm) print with your head 25 to 35 mm from chin to crown, so head size matters while you are shooting. If you are renewing online, State publishes no size at all and crops the photo inside its own application, and asks you to leave a little extra room around your face. Shooting a bit wide is right for the online route and merely harmless for the paper one, so when in doubt, stand back.

Online renewal is also restricted — State’s Renew Online page requires you to be age 25 or older, among other conditions. If you are not eligible you are on the paper route.

1. Choosing the wall

State asks for a background that is “white or off-white, free of shadows, and plain without texture, objects, or lines”. Most walls fail on texture before they fail on colour: heavy paint, woodchip, a skirting board, the edge of a doorframe, a light switch, a picture hook. Walk around the house and look for the flattest, emptiest white surface you own.

  • If you have no white wall, use State’s own suggestion: “Use a white blanket or sheet to cover a non-white wall.” Pull it tight. A sheet with folds in it has texture, lines and shadows all at once, which is three failures from one wrinkle.
  • Do not use a door. Panels, handles and frames are exactly the “objects and lines” the rule is about.
  • Watch the top of the frame. A ceiling line or coving creeping into the top of the picture is a line in the background.
  • If you use a wheelchair and part of the head support appears behind you, State says that is acceptable — include a note with your application explaining that the background is not completely white because you are in a wheelchair.

Stand away from it — about a metre

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that removes shadows. State says “Position yourself several feet away from a white background or wall”, on both routes. Several feet is roughly a metre or more — that conversion is ours; State gives a metric figure only for the camera distance, which we come to in a moment.

The physics is simple: the closer you stand to a wall, the harder your own shadow lands on it. Step forward until there is real space behind you and the shadow falls on the floor instead of beside your head. One of State’s unacceptable examples is exactly this failure: “You have shadows on the side of your head.”

2. The light

State’s lighting rules are all about evenness, not brightness:

“Have uniform lighting on your face.” “Make sure the image is clear, reproduces skin tones accurately, and does not have shadows.” “Avoid placing overhead lighting or lights too far off to the side. This can cast shadows on your face, obscuring your facial features.” “Make sure lighting isn’t too bright which can make your image overexposed, or too dim which can make your image underexposed.”

In practice that means light coming at you from the front:

  • Face a window, on an overcast day if you can. The person holding the camera stands with their back to the window; you look towards it. State’s online page says to “Take the photo in a well-lit area with natural lighting”.
  • Turn the ceiling light off. Overhead light is named in the rule. It puts shadows in your eye sockets and under your nose and chin.
  • Do not put a lamp to one side. An unacceptable example on the online page reads: “The lighting is not balanced. There is too much light on one side of your face, and the other side has shadows.”
  • Avoid direct sun. It is bright enough to blow out one side of your face and it makes people squint, which conflicts with “both eyes open and visible”.
  • Flash is a trap. It causes red eye, and red eye is a stated rejection cause that you are explicitly not allowed to edit out afterwards. State’s tip: “Adjust or turn off the camera flash to avoid red eye.”
  • If colours look wrong, State suggests changing your camera’s white balance setting. Mixed light — a warm bulb plus daylight — is the usual cause of skin tones that do not reproduce accurately.

3. The camera, and how far away it goes

State publishes one distance figure, in a photo tip on the paper page: “The camera should be several feet (1.2 m) away from you.” So the geometry is: you about a metre in front of the wall, and the camera several feet — a good stride or two — in front of you.

  • Use the rear camera. On most phones the front camera is the lower-quality one, and State asks you to set the camera to its highest quality setting before you shoot.
  • Hold the camera level with your eyes. “You are looking down at the camera” is an unacceptable example on the online page, and “Directly face the camera without tilting your head” is in the opening list on both. A camera held at chest height makes you look down even when your head feels straight.
  • Frame head and shoulders. On the online route State is specific: “The bottom frame of the photo should be the edge of your shoulders near where they connect to your arms.” On the paper route: “Make sure your head and shoulders are centered in the photo.”
  • Take a lot of them. Ten photos cost nothing and give you a choice of expression, blink and focus. This is our advice, not a State rule.

Why an arm’s-length selfie usually fails

We want to be precise here, because a great deal of advice on this topic is stated more confidently than the source supports. The word “selfie” does not appear on either State Department passport page. State does not ban them. What it publishes are two things that a phone held at arm’s length tends to break:

  1. The distance rule. An arm is about 60 cm. The published figure is several feet, around 1.2 m. At half the distance your nose is noticeably closer to the lens than your ears are, which widens the nose and narrows the sides of the face. State’s own unacceptable example is “You are too close to the camera”, and a video tip says plainly: “Photos that are taken too close or too far away will be rejected.”
  2. The framing. Holding a phone out puts one shoulder forward and tilts the head, so “your head is rotated, and your shoulders are not square to the camera” and “your head is tilted to the side” become likely — both are listed as unacceptable.

There is one more hint worth reading carefully. A photo tip on the online renewal page says: “Make sure your full face is visible when you have someone take your photo.” That is as close as State comes to assuming a second person. It is an assumption, not a prohibition, and we will not tell you it is a rule.

If you are alone, a phone on a shelf or propped against a stack of books at eye height, with a timer or a voice command, gets you the distance and the square shoulders that an outstretched arm cannot.

4. Asking someone to take it

It is the easiest path, and State names it: your options are an acceptance facility, any company that offers photo services, or “a friend or family member”. Nothing needs to be stamped, signed or coded.

Hand them this:

  • Stand a couple of strides back, with your back to the window.
  • Hold the phone at the height of my eyes, not at your chest.
  • Get my whole head in, down to where my shoulders meet my arms.
  • Do not zoom with your fingers — step closer or further away instead.
  • Tell me if my head is tilted. I cannot feel it.
  • Take ten.

5. What to wear

Wear ordinary clothes. State’s published clothing rules are shorter than you might expect, and we are not going to extend them:

  • No uniform, nothing that looks like a uniform, and no camouflage. This is on the paper page and repeated in the DS-11 and DS-82 instructions, which add “Photos are to be taken in clothing normally worn on a daily basis.” The online renewal page does not mention uniforms at all.
  • Nothing that blocks your face. A scarf across the chin is an unacceptable example on the online page.
  • Jewellery and facial piercings are fine on the paper route, “as long as they do not hide your face”.
  • There is no published rule about the colour of your clothing. You may have read that a white top is forbidden because it blends into the background. State does not say that on either page. If you would rather not risk a reviewer’s judgement about where your shoulders end, a mid-tone top is a reasonable personal choice — but it is a choice, not a requirement.

6. What to take off

  • Glasses. All of them: eyeglasses, sunglasses, tinted glasses. The paper page adds “Do not rest them on your head for the photo.” If you cannot remove them for medical reasons, State asks for a signed note from your doctor with the application.
  • Hats and head coverings. Remove them. Religious head coverings are allowed — on the paper route with a signed statement that it is religious attire worn daily in public, and on both routes the covering must be one colour with material that has no patterns or small holes, and your full face must stay visible.
  • Face coverings and medical masks. “Your full face must be visible.”
  • Headphones and earbuds. The paper page is explicit: “You cannot wear headphones or wireless hands-free devices in or on your ears.” The online page does not mention them; take them out anyway.
  • Work ID and lanyards. A tip on the online page: “You should also remove any employee ID badge or lanyard for your photo.”
  • Everyone else. For a child’s photo the paper page states “No other person can be in the photo” — no hands holding the child’s head, no parent in the frame.

7. Your face while the shutter goes

The expression rules are the one place the two routes are worded differently.

  • Paper route: “Avoid exaggerated facial expressions. You can smile in your photo. Just make sure your eyes are open and your mouth is closed.” Note that the summary at the top of the same page asks for a neutral expression, so the two halves of the page do not quite agree.
  • Online renewal route: “Use a neutral facial expression or natural smile. Avoid showing teeth.”

A relaxed, closed-mouth expression satisfies every one of those readings, which is why it is the only expression we suggest. Beyond that: face the camera with your full face in view and your head not tilted; keep your hair off your eyes, because “the colored portions of your eyes must be clearly visible”; keep your shoulders square.

8. What not to do — State’s wording, not ours

This is the section that ends applications. State does not merely prefer an unedited photo; it says it screens for editing, and both passport pages carry the same tip: “We check all photos to ensure you are not using artificial intelligence tools.”

  • No filters. “Do not change your photo using computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence.” An unacceptable example: “The image appears to be edited and is using filters that make it different than an original image.”
  • No beauty mode, smoothing or “natural” portrait modes. Many phones apply skin smoothing, eye enlargement or blemish removal by default, before you ever see the file. State does not name these features, but the rule it does publish is “Submit the original, unchanged photo”, and a photo that arrived smoothed is not that. Go into your camera settings and turn the effects off before you shoot, not after.
  • No portrait-mode background blur. The background has to be a plain wall. A simulated shallow depth of field is a change made by software.
  • No background replacement or removal. State’s unacceptable example is direct: “The background is cropped using a photo retouching tool, changing the outline of your head, face, and neck.” And the instruction when the background is wrong: “Do not enhance or change the photo using software or artificial intelligence tools. Fix your lighting and background and take a new photo.”
  • No AI enhancement, and no AI-generated photo. One of State’s own examples shows an image that looks fine and is still unacceptable: “While the image may appear acceptable, it was created using an artificial intelligence tool based on the previous photo example. Take a new photo without making digital changes or enhancements.”
  • No red-eye correction. “Do not use editing tools to cover up red eye, as this changes your natural eye color and shape.” The online page says the same differently: “If the photo has a red-eye effect on your eyes, do not edit it. Take a new photo with natural lighting.”
  • No stretching or squashing to make it fit. “Do not stretch or compress your image to resize it.”
  • No photo of a photo, and no scan. On the online route: “Do not take a photo of a printed photo or scan a physical photo to make a digital file.” On the paper route: “Do not submit photocopies or digitally scanned photos.”
  • Do not send it to yourself by text message. A rule that surprises people, and it is published: “To avoid making your image quality worse, do not send the image via text message.” Use email, a cable, or your phone’s own file transfer.

The pattern in every one of those lines is the same. When something is wrong, State’s instruction is always to take another photo, never to fix the file. That is also our position: we check photographs, and we do not change them.

9. Checking the result yourself

Open the best frame on the biggest screen you have, zoom in to full size, and work down this list. Each line is a published rule, and each one has sunk somebody’s application.

  1. Sharpness. Zoomed in, are the eyelashes crisp? Not blurry, grainy or pixelated.
  2. Exposure. Not washed out, not murky. Skin tones look like your skin.
  3. Shadows. None on your face. None on the wall behind you.
  4. Background. White or off-white, plain, no texture, no lines, no objects.
  5. Eyes. Both open, irises fully visible, no hair across them, no red eye.
  6. Mouth. Closed. On the online route, no teeth showing.
  7. Head. Straight to camera, not tilted, not rotated, shoulders square.
  8. Whole head in frame. Hair may run past the edges, but the head itself must be complete.
  9. Nothing on your face or in your ears. No glasses, hat, mask, earbuds, badge.
  10. Colour. Not black and white.
  11. Date. Taken in the last 6 months. Check the file’s date, not your memory.
  12. Paper route only. Will your head measure 25 to 35 mm inside a 51 mm square? Our 2 x 2 inch layout tool answers that in the browser without uploading anything.
  13. Online route only. Is the file a JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF, between 54 KB and 10 MB? Is there room left around your face for State’s cropper?

Then, if you want a second opinion, run it through our free photo checker. It reports each rule as passed, failed, needing a person’s judgement, or not checked, quotes State’s wording next to each one, and tells you plainly what it was unable to measure. It is free and needs no account. A full check with a human review is 9.90 USD — one payment, for one person and one document.

Payments are in test mode. No order on this site can be paid for real yet. The free check works today.

The honest limit of all of this

Doing every step above gives you a photograph that satisfies the rules the State Department has published. It does not give you an accepted application. An employee reviews the photo after you apply, several of the rules — expression, whether a covering blocks your face, whether the image looks edited — are human judgements, and that judgement is theirs, not ours and not any website’s.

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Sources

Every quotation above was read on 16 September 2026 from the two pages below. Their footers then read “Last Updated: March 24, 2026” (paper) and “Last Updated: May 04, 2026” (online renewal). Check the source before you rely on a detail.