US passport photo requirements, by application route
There is no single set of US passport photo rules. The U.S. Department of State publishes one page for applications sent on a paper form and a different page for photos uploaded to an online renewal, and the two pages do not say the same thing. This guide puts them side by side, gives the source URL for every line, and separates what State actually publishes from the numbers the internet has attached to it.
First, which route are you on
The answer changes which rules apply to you, so it is worth settling before you read any further.
- The paper route. You complete form DS-11 (first passport, or a replacement for a lost, stolen or damaged one) or DS-82 (renewal by mail), and you attach a printed photograph. The governing page is travel.state.gov — Passport Photos(opens in a new tab), which opens by saying it covers applying or renewing “with a paper form”. The photo rules are also printed in the forms themselves: DS-11 (PDF)(opens in a new tab) and DS-82 (PDF)(opens in a new tab), both revision 04-2025.
- The online renewal route. You renew through the State Department’s own application and upload a digital file. The governing page is travel.state.gov — Uploading a Digital Photo(opens in a new tab). Online renewal is not open to everyone: State’s eligibility page lists, among other conditions, that you are age 25 or older, that the passport you are renewing was issued for ten years, and that it is expiring within a year or expired less than five years ago (Renew Online(opens in a new tab)). If you are not eligible, you are on the paper route and the paper rules apply.
State is explicit that the online application must be completed by the applicant: “You must complete your own online application. You cannot use a third-party service or have someone submit the application on your behalf.” We sell a photo check. We cannot submit anything for you, and no website that is not opr.travel.state.gov can.
The two routes, line by line
Where a cell says Not published, that is the finding, not a gap in this table. It means the wording does not appear on that route’s State Department page, and we have not borrowed a number from anywhere else to fill it in.
| Rule | Paper form (DS-11 / DS-82) | Online renewal upload | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Print geometry | |||
| Printed size | 2 x 2 inches (51 x 51 mm) | Not published — nothing is printed on this route | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Head height, chin to top of head | 1 -1 3/8 inches (25 - 35 mm) in the printed photo | Not published in inches, millimetres or per cent of frame | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Eye height from the bottom edge | Not published | Not published | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Paper and finish | Matte or glossy photo-quality paper. No photocopies, no digitally scanned photos, no visible printer dots, no holes, creases or smudges. | Not applicable. State says the opposite: do not take a photo of a printed photo, and do not scan a physical photo to make the file. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| How many photos | One colour photo | One file | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| The file itself | |||
| File format | Not published — you submit a print, not a file | “The photo is a JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC, or HEIF file.” | online(opens in a new tab) |
| File size | Not published | “The file size should be between 54 KB and 10 MB.” Note the modal verb: State writes should, not must. | online(opens in a new tab) |
| Pixel dimensions | Not published | Not published — no pixel figure appears anywhere on the page | online(opens in a new tab) |
| Aspect ratio / square | The finished print is square, because it is 2 x 2 inches | Not published. The words “square” and “aspect” do not appear on the page, and State crops the photo inside its own application. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Colour space | Not published | Not published | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| DPI or PPI | No number. The only mention is a tip to “increase printer’s resolution (dots per inch (DPI) setting)”. | Not published | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Framing, and who does the cropping | |||
| Distance | “Position yourself several feet away from the camera with your head centered and head fully visible.” A photo tip gives “several feet (1.2 m)”. | “Position yourself several feet away from a white background or wall.” Same wording, no metric equivalent given. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Where the bottom of the frame sits | “Make sure your head and shoulders are centered in the photo.” | “The bottom frame of the photo should be the edge of your shoulders near where they connect to your arms.” Unique to this route. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Cropping | You crop and print to 2 x 2 inches yourself before you attach the photo. | “You can reposition or crop your photo in the application.” And: “If you’re not sure, leave a little extra room around your face.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Automated check before you submit | None published. | “The photo tool will check if your photo meets the basic requirements. If your photo is not acceptable, the system will let you know what you need to change.” | online(opens in a new tab) |
| Review after you submit | An employee reviews the application. | “An employee will review your photo after we receive your application. If there’s an issue, we will send you a letter or email asking you to send us a new photo.” | online(opens in a new tab) |
| The photograph | |||
| Age of the photo | Taken in the last 6 months | Taken in the last 6 months | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Colour | “Submit 1 color photo” | “The photo must be in color” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Background | White or off-white, free of shadows, and plain without texture, objects or lines. A white blanket or sheet over a non-white wall is State’s own suggestion. | A plain background with no shadows, texture, lines or objects; white or off-white. Same sheet-over-the-wall tip. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Expression | “Avoid exaggerated facial expressions. You can smile in your photo. Just make sure your eyes are open and your mouth is closed.” | “Use a neutral facial expression or natural smile. Avoid showing teeth.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Eyes | Open, not covered by hair, and “the colored portions of your eyes must be clearly visible”. A baby’s eyes need not be entirely open; all other children’s must be. | “Look directly at the camera with your eyes open.” Not covered by hair. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| What you may and may not wear | |||
| Glasses | Remove eyeglasses, sunglasses and tinted glasses, and do not rest them on your head. A medical exception needs a signed note from your doctor. | “If you are wearing glasses or a hat, remove them and take the photo without them.” The page’s opening list allows documented religious or medical reasons. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Hats and head coverings | Remove. Religious wear needs a signed statement that it is worn daily in public; medical wear needs a doctor’s statement. Full face visible, no shadows, one colour, no patterns or small holes. | Allowed for religious purposes. “The head covering must be one color, and the material should not have patterns or small holes.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Uniforms and camouflage | Banned: “You cannot wear a uniform, clothing that looks like a uniform, or camouflage clothing.” The DS-11 and DS-82 instructions repeat it. | Not mentioned on this page. We do not assume it carries over, and we flag it for a person rather than guess. | paper(opens in a new tab) · DS-11(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Headphones and earbuds | Banned: “You cannot wear headphones or wireless hands-free devices in or on your ears.” | Not mentioned on this page. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Jewellery, piercings, badges | Jewellery and facial piercings are allowed as long as they do not hide your face. | Not mentioned, except: “remove any employee ID badge or lanyard for your photo”. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Face coverings and masks | “Take off any face covering or medical mask. Your full face must be visible.” | The opening list says to remove anything covering your face unless for documented religious or medical reasons; a scarf blocking part of the face is an unacceptable example. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Editing | |||
| Edited, filtered or AI photos | “Submit the original, unchanged photo.” “Do not change your photo using computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence.” | “If your photo is unnaturally edited or filtered, we will not accept it. Do not use a photo you created or edited using artificial intelligence or other digital tools.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Red eye | Do not submit photos with red eye, and “do not use editing tools to cover up red eye, as this changes your natural eye color and shape”. | “If the photo has a red-eye effect on your eyes, do not edit it. Take a new photo with natural lighting.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Resizing | “Do not stretch or compress your image to resize it.” | Not mentioned in these words. | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Who may take it, and for whom | |||
| Who takes the photo | An acceptance facility, any company that offers photo services, or “a friend or family member”. No photographer certification, stamp or photo code is required. | The page does not list options. Its one hint is a tip: “Make sure your full face is visible when you have someone take your photo.” | paper(opens in a new tab) · online(opens in a new tab) |
| Babies and children | A dedicated section: plain white or off-white sheet, no other person in the photo, neutral expression, full face visible. | Not applicable. Online renewal requires the applicant to be age 25 or older. | paper(opens in a new tab) · eligibility(opens in a new tab) |
What the State Department does not publish
This section is the reason the page exists. A requirement that is not published cannot be checked, and a site that tells you your photo “meets” an unpublished number is inventing a standard. Every item below was searched for on the relevant State Department page and was not there.
For both routes
- No eye height. Neither passport page states where your eyes must sit above the bottom edge, in millimetres, inches or per cent. The figure people quote is a visa figure; see the next section.
- No head-size percentage. The paper route gives head height in millimetres inside a 51 mm print. Neither page expresses head size as a percentage of the image.
- No colour space. “sRGB” appears on neither page.
- No numeric sharpness, noise or exposure threshold. State describes the outcome — “not blurry, grainy, or pixelated”, not “too bright”, not “too dim” — and leaves the judgement to the person reviewing your application.
- No ban on selfies. The word “selfie” does not appear on either page. What is published is a distance rule and, on the online page, a tip that assumes someone else is holding the camera. Those two things together are why a phone at arm’s length usually fails, but State has not written the rule you may have read elsewhere.
- No rule about the colour of your clothing. The published clothing rules are the uniform ban, the camouflage ban and “anything covering your face”. There is no published instruction to avoid white tops.
For the paper route
- No file specification at all. No format, no file size, no pixel dimensions. What you hand in is a print.
- No numeric DPI. Dots per inch appear once, inside a tip about your printer’s settings. There is no threshold to pass or fail against.
For the online renewal route
- No pixel dimensions, minimum or maximum. The page contains no pixel figure of any kind.
- No aspect ratio, and no statement that the photo must be square. State asks you to leave extra room and crops the photo itself.
- No head or eye geometry. The only framing instruction is the qualitative one about the bottom of the frame sitting at the shoulder line.
- No statement about what happens to a pre-cropped upload. State never says an already-square file will be rejected. Uploading an uncropped head-and-shoulders file is a sensible margin of safety because State’s own cropper expects room to work with — but that is a judgement, not a published requirement, and we label it as one.
Where 600 x 600, sRGB, 240 kB and 300 ppi actually come from
These numbers are real, they are published by the U.S. Department of State, and they are visa requirements. They are not passport requirements. If a site presents them as passport rules, it has copied them from the wrong programme.
The US visa programme publishes a digital image specification on travel.state.gov — Digital Image Requirements(opens in a new tab), and it is as specific as the passport pages are vague:
- Dimensions. “The image dimensions must be in a square aspect ratio (the height must be equal to the width). Minimum acceptable dimensions are 600 x 600 pixels. Maximum acceptable dimensions are 1200 x 1200 pixels.”
- Colour. “The image must be in color (24 bits per pixel) in sRGB color space which is the common output for most digital cameras.”
- Format. “The image must be in JPEG file format”.
- File size. “The image must be less than or equal to 240 kB (kilobytes).”
- Compression. “The compression ratio should be less than or equal to 20:1.”
- 300 ppi. It appears in the instructions for scanning an existing printed photo: “Scanned at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch (12 pixels per millimeter).”
The eye-height figures come from a second visa page, travel.state.gov — Photo Composition Template(opens in a new tab), which says for a paper visa photo: “Make sure the eye height is between 1 1/8 inches to 1 3/8 inches (28 mm – 35 mm) from the bottom of the photo”, and for a digital one that the head must be “between 50% and 69% of the image’s total height” with eye height “between 56% and 69% of the image’s height”.
Read those two pages and the confusion explains itself. The visa pages also state 2 x 2 inches and a 25–35 mm head, exactly like the passport page — so the shared numbers make the unshared ones look shared too. They are not. Applying 240 kB to an online passport renewal would push you under State’s published 54 KB floor for no reason, and cropping to a 600 x 600 square removes the room State’s own cropper asks you to leave.
And the Photo Tool is a third source of the same number
State runs a cropping utility at tsg.phototool.state.gov(opens in a new tab). Its code accepts JPEG only, refuses images below 600 x 600, and outputs a 600 x 600 square. That is where a second helping of “600 x 600” enters the conversation. The tool carries its own banner, in a red box:
“US Citizens: Do not use this tool if you are renewing your passport online.” “Photo Tool is intended for cropping your photo only when you are applying in person or by mail.”
So the tool’s 600 x 600 is the tool’s behaviour, for the paper route, and the tool itself tells online renewers to stay away. It is not a published passport requirement on either route. Worth knowing: the current passport photos page no longer links to the Photo Tool at all — the link now lives on the visa pages.
Two places where State’s own pages disagree with themselves
Both of these are on the paper page, and both are worth knowing before you measure anything.
- 1 3/8 inches, or 1.4 inches. The requirement bullet reads “between 1 -1 3/8 inches (25 - 35 mm)”. Four separate photo tips on the same page read “between 1 inch and 1.4 inches (25 and 35 mm)”. 1 3/8 in is 34.9 mm; 1.4 in is 35.6 mm. The millimetre pair is identical in both, and the DS-11 and DS-82 forms both say “1-1 3/8 inches”, so the millimetres are the safe thing to measure: 25 to 35 mm.
- Neutral, or you can smile. The opening summary on the paper page says “Face the camera directly with a neutral expression, both eyes open and visible, and mouth closed”. The expression section further down says “You can smile in your photo. Just make sure your eyes are open and your mouth is closed.” A closed-mouth smile satisfies both readings, which is the only advice that is safe under either. The online page is the one that adds “Avoid showing teeth.”
What we check, and what we do not
We measure your photo against the rules above, per route, and we tell you which rule each result came from and where State published it. Three things we will not do:
- We do not change your photograph. No retouching, no filters, no background replacement, no AI enhancement, no red-eye removal. State’s wording is “Submit the original, unchanged photo”, and both pages carry the tip “We check all photos to ensure you are not using artificial intelligence tools.” On the online renewal route we hand your original file back to you untouched, because that is the file State asks for.
- We do not check against numbers State has not published. Where a value is unpublished, your report says so and reports that item as unchecked. It never reports a pass it did not earn.
- We do not promise acceptance. Nobody outside the State Department can. An employee reviews your photo after you apply, and that decision is theirs.
The check 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.
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 check works.
Next
- US passport photo for a paper application — the print geometry in full.
- Photo for renewing a US passport online — the file specification, and what State crops for you.
- The standards we check against — the live requirement version per profile, including who has reviewed it and what is still unverified.
- Check your passport photo — free, no sign-up, and it names what it could not check.
Sources
Every quotation on this page was read from the pages below on 16 September 2026. The paper page carried a footer of “Last Updated: March 24, 2026”; the online renewal photo page, “Last Updated: May 04, 2026”; the online renewal eligibility page, “Last Updated: September 04, 2026”. State can change any of them after that date without telling us, so check the source before you rely on a detail.
- U.S. Department of State — Passport Photos (paper form)(opens in a new tab)
- U.S. Department of State — Uploading a Digital Photo (online renewal)(opens in a new tab)
- U.S. Department of State — Renew Online (eligibility)(opens in a new tab)
- Form DS-11, revision 04-2025 (PDF)(opens in a new tab)
- Form DS-82, revision 04-2025 (PDF)(opens in a new tab)
- U.S. visa — Digital Image Requirements (contrast case)(opens in a new tab)
- U.S. visa — Photo Composition Template (contrast case)(opens in a new tab)
- U.S. Department of State — Photo Tool(opens in a new tab)