Photo requirements by document

Every US document wants the same photo

This surprises people. The passport book, the passport card, the visa, the green card, the work permit, Global Entry, naturalisation — all of them are 2 x 2 inches with your head between 50% and 69% of the frame on a plain white background. There is no separate “green card photo size”. If you have a compliant US passport photo you have a compliant photo for all of them.

What actually differs between US documents is not the picture. It is the file size ceiling on whatever portal you upload to, and that varies by a factor of fifty: the DS-160 visa form and the DV lottery cap uploads at 240 KB, online passport renewal accepts up to 10 MB, and USCIS forms up to 12 MB. A photo that sails through one is rejected by the next for being too big — which is a compression problem, not a photo problem. That is what the compressor is for.

The second difference is glasses, and it is narrower than people expect. Every US document here requires them off; a documented medical need, with a signed note from your doctor, is the only way round it. The DV lottery photo and a baby’s photo allow no exception at all. Of every specification on this site, only the Chinese 33 x 48 mm photo accepts ordinary glasses, and then only if there is no glare and the frames do not cross your eyes.

Why a US photo fails abroad

A 2 x 2 inch US photo and a 35 x 45 mm international photo are not the same picture at a different size. The head is a different proportion of the frame. US documents want your head at 50–69% of the image height; the UK, Schengen, India and Japan want roughly 71–76%. Your face has to be noticeably larger in the frame.

So you cannot crop a US passport photo down to 35 x 45 mm and submit it — the head comes out too small and it is refused. It has to be re-cropped from the original, which is what the35 x 45 mm maker does. Backgrounds differ too: white is near-universal, but the UK asks for plain cream or light grey, and a pure white photo is a common UK rejection.

How to read the numbers on these pages

Head height is measured from the bottom of your chin to the top of your head including hair, not to your forehead or your eyebrows. Tall or voluminous hair counts, which is why some people measure compliant at the barber and non-compliant the week before.

Eye height is measured from the bottom edge of the photo up to the centre of your eyes. Both rules have to hold at once, and that is the actual difficulty: scaling the photo to fix your head height moves your eye line, and moving the crop to fix your eye line changes nothing about your head height. Every document on this site publishes both, and the tool solves them together rather than one at a time.