How to make a passport or visa photo at home

Stand or sit facing a plain wall with even light on your face — daylight from a window works well. Have someone take the photo, or prop the phone up and use its timer, so the camera is at eye level. Keep your expression neutral, both eyes open, and your whole head plus a little shoulder in frame.

Barely acceptable originals produce barely acceptable results. The tool can crop, size, and shrink your picture, but it cannot relight a shadowed face or remove a patterned background. If the original is poor, retake it before spending time on the settings.

Open Passport Photo Maker and choose the size your application asks for: 2×2 inches (600×600 px) for US passports and most US visas, 35×45 mm for UK, EU, India and many Schengen applications, or one of the other presets. Line your head up inside the dashed oval, level your eyes with the guide, and use the zoom and position sliders until the framing looks right.

Some forms want a plain white or light grey background. Use the background fill only when the original background is already close to plain — the fill paints around your silhouette's rectangle, it does not cut your hair out. Check your country's official guidance before submitting; rules about glasses, head coverings, and photo age differ and change.

Government upload portals often reject photos above a strict limit, commonly between 20 and 240 KB. Passport Photo Maker has a maximum file size box for exactly this: set the number your form allows, make the photo, and it saves a JPG that fits. If you already have a correctly cropped picture that is simply too large, run it through Compress Image to KB instead and type the limit there.

Download the result and open it from your files app before uploading it anywhere. Confirm the framing still looks right after compression, then rename the file to something your form will accept and keep the original untouched.

This workflow produces a correctly sized image; it is not an official photo check. Agencies judge lighting, contrast, and compliance themselves, and a rejected photo usually just means retaking it. For first-time passport applications or photos with unusual requirements, a professional photographer remains the safer option.

Everything happens in your browser — the photo is read from your device, processed there, and downloaded back. Nothing is uploaded, which is the point when the subject of the photo is you.