How to take a passport photo at home (that actually passes)

First, what the rules actually demand

Almost every passport and visa photo rule in the world comes down to the same short list. The photo must be recent — taken within the last 6 months. Your head must fill a set share of the frame (for a US passport or visa photo, between half and just over two-thirds of the height). The background must be plain white or off-white, with nothing and nobody in it. No glasses, no hats, no filters, no editing that changes how you look. And the file itself has to match a size: 600 × 600 pixels and under 240 KB for a US visa or DV Lottery photo, 2 × 2 inches for a printed US passport photo.

None of that needs a studio. It needs a wall, decent light and a bit of patience. The rest of this guide is the method we describe to people who write to us after a rejection — most of them could have passed the first time with a better setup, not a better camera.

The setup: a wall, a window, a chair

Find the plainest wall in your home — white or light cream, nothing hanging on it. If every wall has texture or a pattern, hang a plain white bedsheet and pull it flat; wrinkles show up as shadows, so stretch it tight. Stand or sit about half a metre in front of it, not pressed against it, so your shadow falls behind and below instead of onto the wall.

Face a window. Daylight coming at your face from the front lights both sides evenly, and even light is the whole game: one-sided light carves a shadow across one cheek, and shadows across the face are a classic rejection reason. Avoid overhead bulbs on their own — they sink your eyes into shadow. If you must shoot in the evening, two lamps at equal height, one on each side at 45 degrees, beats one bright ceiling light.

Put the phone on something solid at eye level — a stack of books on a shelf works — about 1.2 to 1.5 metres away. A selfie at arm's length distorts your face and almost always breaks the head-size rule, so use the rear camera, a timer, and ideally a second person to press the button.

Taking the shot, step by step

Clean the lens first; a smeared lens softens the whole photo, and soft photos get flagged. Turn off portrait mode, beauty mode and every filter — they reshape faces and blur backgrounds, and both are against the rules. Use the plain photo mode, tap your face to focus, and lock the brightness so the background stays light without blowing your face out to white.

Sit up straight, shoulders level, looking directly into the lens with a neutral expression — mouth closed, both eyes open. Chin neither up nor down: your eyes should sit roughly in the middle band of the frame. Take at least ten shots. Small differences in shadow and sharpness decide pass or fail, and you want a choice.

Then zoom in on each shot and judge it like an examiner: Is one side of your face darker? Is there a shadow of your head on the wall? Are your ears and hairline clear? Is anything behind you — a door edge, a picture frame, another person walking past? Keep the best two or three and check them properly before you use one.

The mistakes we see most often

The single most common failure with home photos is the background. People shoot against a wall that looks white in person but photographs grey or yellow, or they stand in a doorway with a room behind them. The second is light: a window to one side feels natural and looks dramatic, and dramatic is exactly what the rules do not want. The third is old photos — a good photo from two years ago is still an old photo, and reusing one is the quietest way to get an application thrown out.

Glasses deserve a special mention because the rule changed and many people missed it: for US visa and DV Lottery photos, glasses are not allowed at all, even if you wear them every day. Take them off. Head coverings worn daily for religious reasons are allowed, but your full face must stay visible and the covering must not cast a shadow.

Check it before you submit it

A photo can look perfect on your phone screen and still fail on pixels, file size or head position — the things you cannot judge by eye. Before you upload it anywhere that matters, run it through a checker that measures those numbers for you. Our US passport photo maker crops to the official 2 × 2 inch frame, and the form photo validator tests a photo against the rules for US visas, the DV Lottery, Schengen visas and more. Both work in your browser — the photo never leaves your device — and both are free.

If the check flags something, it is almost always one of the fixable things above: light, background, head size, or the file being too big. Retake rather than edit. An honest retake passes; a heavily edited photo can fail twice — once for the original problem, once for the editing.

Questions people ask us