Document photo requirements by category

Every document type measures a photo by its own yardstick: a passport office looks at the head height inside a printed frame, a consulate at the background and the crop of a visa photo, a licence portal at the pixel size of the file you upload. This hub sorts those rules into categories, so you can start from the document you are actually applying for instead of guessing which general standard covers it. Open a category to compare countries side by side, or go straight to your country below.

8 document categories 154 verified countries Last update

Every figure on the pages below is taken from the authority that issues the document, with a link to the source and the date we last read it. Where a country publishes nothing precise, we say so instead of filling the gap with an international average: a portrait accepted in one country is refused in the next over two millimetres of head height.

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Choose your document category

Start from the paper you are applying for, not from the reason for the trip: a residence permit and a long-stay visa can be filed at the same consulate and still demand different photos. If your document is not named here, open the closest category — inside, the country tables list every document we have verified, with its exact format.

Passport photos 123 countries The category most authorities document in full: a printed format, a fixed band for head height and biometric rules that follow ICAO 9303, the international standard for machine-readable travel documents. Visa photos 135 countries Consular photos, handed in on paper or uploaded to an application portal. The size rarely matches the passport of the same country, and individual consulates add their own crop and file-weight limits. ID card photos 71 countries The rules often mirror the passport of the same country, but the portrait is frequently taken at the counter itself — check whether a photo you prepared at home is still accepted where you apply. Residence permit photos 55 countries Most of these cards carry a biometric chip, so the portrait has to pass an automated face-match, and the accepted file is often specified more tightly than for a paper visa. Driving licence photos 39 countries Set by the transport authority rather than the passport office, so the size and the background differ from the other documents of the same country. And in a few countries no photo is submitted for a national licence — the authority takes it. Work permit photos 45 countries The photo usually follows the residence rules of the same country, but the file travels with your employer’s paperwork, so a refused portrait holds up the whole application, not just your appointment. Citizenship photos 12 countries The portrait ends up in a naturalisation record kept for decades, so recency, a neutral expression and even lighting are examined more closely than usual. Document photos 33 countries Everything else we have verified: travel documents, internal passports, national cards and portal-only formats that do not belong to the categories above.

Requirements by country

A category tells you what kind of photo you are dealing with; a country page tells you exactly what your authority asks for. That is where the numbers live — millimetres, head height as a share of the frame, background colour, minimum resolution — next to the official page they were taken from and the date it was last checked. If you already know both the country and the document, that is the shortest route.

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What almost every document photo has in common

The rest is local. Printed formats run from the 35 × 45 mm used across most of Europe to the 51 × 51 mm square required for USA documents, and each authority measures head height from a different point. So take the figure from your own country page.

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