Check your passport photo before you pay

The check is free and it is the same check every time. You choose which document you are applying for, add a photo, and we report what we found rule by rule — what passed, what failed, what a person still has to look at, and what we could not check at all. No account, no email address, no card.

Either link opens an empty order and asks for a photo. Nothing is charged at that point, and you can close the tab and never come back.

Choose the document first, because the rules are not the same

There is no single "US passport photo" standard. The State Department publishes two different rule sets on two different pages, and the most expensive mistake in this market is to treat them as one. Pick the wrong one and you get a careful check against rules that do not apply to you.

What the free check measures

Everything below runs on every upload, before payment, as many times as you like. Each one is reported as pass, fail, needs review or not checked, with the State Department's own wording and the URL it came from beside it.

The file itself

• File format. Read from the first bytes of the file, not from the name on the end of it. A photo whose name ends in ".jpg" but whose bytes say otherwise is caught here, and so is a file your phone renamed on the way out.
• Readable image. Whether we can actually decode the pixels rather than just read the header. If we cannot, we say so and stop — we never report a file we could not open as a photo that passed.
• File safety. The header is compared against the number of pixels it claims before anything is decoded, so a small file designed to expand into an enormous bitmap is refused rather than opened.
• File size. Measured against the band the authority actually publishes. For online renewal that is 54 KB to 10 MB, both ends. For the paper form State publishes no file size at all, so the only ceiling is our own 25 MB upload limit, and the report says that the limit is ours and not theirs.
• Pixel dimensions and shape. We measure the width, the height and the aspect ratio and show you the numbers. We do not grade them, because neither passport route publishes a pixel size or an aspect ratio to grade them against. A measurement with nothing to measure against is reported as "not checked", never as a pass.
• Still image and transparency. An animated file or one with a transparent layer is not a photograph of a person in front of a wall, and is reported as such.

The image

• Colour photo. Whether the image carries real colour, rather than a greyscale picture saved inside a colour file. Both routes ask for "1 color photo taken in the last 6 months".
• Lighting. Overall exposure, plus whether the brightest and darkest parts of the frame still hold any detail. State asks you to make sure lighting "isn't too bright which can make your image overexposed, or too dim which can make your image underexposed", and to fix it with the camera rather than afterwards.
• Focus. Sharpness measured across the frame. State's wording is that the photo must be "not blurry, grainy, or pixelated".
• Background evenness. How much the area behind you varies in brightness, which is how a shadow on the wall shows up in a number.
• Background plainness. Texture, lines, edges and objects behind you — the doorframe, the picture rail, the edge of the curtain.
• Background colour. How far the wall behind you is from the plain white or off-white both routes require.

What the file remembers about itself

• How recent the photo is. The capture date is read from the EXIF metadata where the file still carries it, and compared against the six-month limit both routes publish. Photos that have travelled through a messaging app usually have no EXIF left at all; in that case we report "not checked" rather than assuming the photo is recent.
• Traces of editing. EXIF fields that name editing software. Treat this as a hint in both directions: a photo touched by an editor is not proof of a banned change, and a clean file is not proof that nothing was changed. It is a prompt to look, not a verdict.

Every item above is a measurement of your file. None of them is a decision about your application.

What does not run automatically, and why

What a clean result means, and what it does not

A report with no failures means every rule we can measure looked right against the published requirements for the route you chose, on the day we read those requirements. It is not an approval. We will never tell you that a photo will be accepted, because that is not ours to say.

For online renewal, State runs its own automated check when you upload and states, verbatim: "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." U.S. Department of State, Uploading a Digital Photo(opens in a new tab).

For the paper form, State states, verbatim: "Unacceptable photos are the number one reason why we put passport applications on hold." U.S. Department of State, Passport Photos(opens in a new tab).

Both routes end with a government decision. Everything we do happens before that decision and does not bind it.

We check photographs. We do not make them.

People look for a passport photo maker, a creator or a generator. We are none of those, and we think the honest thing is to say so on the page rather than let the word do work it should not. State's paper page says, verbatim: "Submit the original, unchanged photo." and "Do not change your photo using computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence." Both passport pages carry the line "We check all photos to ensure you are not using artificial intelligence tools." Passport Photos, Digital changes(opens in a new tab).

• We do not retouch, smooth, brighten, straighten or replace a background. Where State's own examples show a background that was cropped or enhanced, they are labelled unacceptable, and State's instruction is to fix the lighting and take a new photo.
• On the paper route we do produce a print layout: your photo placed in the 2 x 2 inch frame and repeated on a 4 x 6 inch sheet so a print booth costs you a few cents. That is cropping and page layout for a print. State runs its own cropping tool for the same route, so cropping is permitted there — the picture itself is not altered.
• On the online renewal route we change nothing whatsoever. You get your original file back byte for byte, because that is what State asks for and because its application does the cropping.

Numbers we are often asked to check, and will not

Almost every "passport photo requirements" list on the internet repeats 600 x 600 pixels, 1200 x 1200 maximum, sRGB, JPEG only, 240 kB, 300 ppi and eyes 28 to 35 mm from the bottom of the photo. Those are real published requirements — of the US visa programme, on the visa pages. U.S. Department of State, visa digital image requirements(opens in a new tab). They are not passport requirements, they do not appear on either passport page, and we do not check a passport photo against them.

State also runs a separate Photo Tool whose code enforces 600 x 600 JPEG, and which carries a banner telling people renewing online not to use it. Those are that tool's own constants for the paper route, not a published requirement for your file. We record every parameter State does not publish as unknown rather than filling the gap with a number from somewhere else; the full list is on the standards we check against.

What the free check costs, and what the paid check adds

The check above is free, with no account and no card, and you can run it on as many photos as you like. If you want the rest — a trained reviewer looking at the things software cannot judge, the print-ready 2 x 2 inch layout and the 4 x 6 inch sheet on the paper route, or your untouched original plus a walkthrough of State's crop tool on the online route — that is 9.90 USD: one payment, for one person and one document. What is in the price.

As above, payments are in test mode today, so no order can actually be paid for. The free check is unaffected by that and runs now.