You only need a phone, a wall, and daylight
Every modern phone camera resolves far more detail than any passport authority requires. The photo itself is the easy part — rejections almost never happen because a phone wasn't "good enough." They happen because of the background, the lighting, the head size, or post-processing. Get those four right and a phone photo is indistinguishable from a studio one.
What you need: a phone, a plain wall, natural daylight from a window, and someone to take the photo (arm's-length selfies distort your face and are a common rejection cause — hand the phone to someone else and stand back).
Get the background right — and know your country's colour
This is the single most common rejection reason. The background must be plain, evenly lit, and completely free of shadow, texture, and objects.
Crucially, the required colour is not universal. The United States, India, Singapore, China, Japan and Australia want plain white. The United Kingdom rejects pure white and requires light grey or cream. France and most of Schengen forbid white outright and require light grey or light blue. Check your specific country before you shoot — using the wrong background colour is an automatic rejection no amount of cropping can fix.
To kill shadows on the background, stand 0.5–1 metre away from the wall rather than right against it. The shadow then falls on the floor behind you, out of frame, instead of onto the wall behind your head.
Light your face evenly — no flash
Turn the on-camera flash off. Flash creates hard shadows, red-eye, and hotspots on the forehead and nose — all rejection causes. Instead, face a large window during daylight so soft, even light falls on your whole face.
Watch for the classic one-window mistake: a single light source on one side leaves the other half of the face in shadow and casts a shadow onto the background. If you only have one window, stand directly facing it, not beside it, or add a second light (a lamp, a white wall bouncing light back) on the dark side.
Frame it correctly — head size is a spec, not a guess
Passport authorities specify how much of the frame your head must fill, and it varies widely: roughly 50–69% for the US, 64–76% for the UK, 70–80% across Schengen and most of Asia, and 80–85% for India. Eyes must be open, level, and looking straight at the lens. Your head must be straight (not tilted), shoulders square, ears visible where possible.
You do not need to measure this with a ruler. Take the photo with your head and shoulders comfortably in frame and some space around you, then use a tool that crops to your exact country's spec — the framing is done mathematically from your face position, not by eyeballing it.
Expression, glasses, and dress
Neutral expression: mouth closed, no smile, no raised eyebrows. Both eyes open and clearly visible, hair not covering the eyes.
Glasses are now banned in most countries — the US (since 2016), the UK (since 2018), France (since 2009), and many others reject any eyewear, including clear lenses. Take them off unless you have a documented medical exemption.
Dress: avoid white or very light tops if the background is white (you blend into it). Some countries enforce a dress code — the Philippines DFA rejects sleeveless tops and plunging necklines, for example. A plain, collared or sleeved top in a mid colour is the safe choice everywhere.
Do not 'enhance' it — AI editing now gets rejected
This is the newest and fastest-growing rejection cause. The US State Department (since January 2026) and India's Passport Seva Program 2.0 (since February 2026) explicitly reject AI-processed photos: beauty filters, skin smoothing, AI lighting, background-replacement apps, and even iPhone Portrait-mode blur all qualify.
The safe workflow is: shoot a clean, unedited photo against the correct background, then only crop and resize it to spec. Cropping and resizing are not "alteration" — changing the pixels of your face or background is. Keep the source photo honest.
Crop and size it to your country's spec — for free
The last step is turning your photo into the exact dimensions your country requires (2×2 inches and 600×600 px for the US, 35×45 mm for the UK and Schengen, 630×810 px for India's portal, 400×514 px for Singapore's, and so on). Doing this by hand in an image editor is fiddly and easy to get wrong.
GotConvert's passport-photo tool does this in your browser with automatic face detection — pick your country, drop the photo, and it crops to the official spec with the head correctly positioned. It runs entirely on your device: the photo is never uploaded to a server. Country pages with each country's exact specification are linked below.