Printing passport photos at home vs at a pharmacy

Both work. Home printing is cheaper and faster and fails in one specific, avoidable way. A pharmacy or photo shop costs more and removes that failure mode entirely — and in four countries it is the only legal route.

First: check you are allowed to print at all

This decides everything else.

Canada requires photos "taken in person by a commercial photographer or photo studio" and "professionally printed on plain, high-quality photographic paper", and states outright: "We don't accept photos printed at home."

France requires an approved photographer or an approved booth. Germany has not accepted self-supplied photos since 1 May 2025 — the photo is captured at the counter or transmitted by a studio over a secure channel. Brazil photographs applicants aged three and over at the appointment.

In those four, home printing is not an option regardless of quality.

The one way home printing fails

Scaling.

A passport photo is a physical measurement. A 35 × 45 mm photo has to come off the printer at 35 × 45 mm, measurable with a ruler. Almost every print dialogue defaults to "Fit to page" or "Scale to fit", which resizes the image to fill the paper. That silently produces a photo that is a few millimetres out, and a few millimetres is enough to be refused.

The fix is one setting:

• Set scaling to 100%, Actual size, or None.
• Turn off "Fit to page", "Shrink oversized pages" and "Scale to fit media".
• On macOS Preview, choose "Scale: 100%" rather than "Scale to Fit".
• On Windows Photos, use "Actual size" rather than "Fit picture to frame".

Then measure the print with a ruler before you cut it. If the photo is meant to be 35 mm wide and measures 33, the scaling was on. Nothing else in this article matters as much as that one check.

Resolution: what you actually need

Print resolution is dots per inch, and it decides how many real pixels a photo needs.

At 300 dpi, a 35 × 45 mm photo needs about 413 × 531 pixels. A 51 × 51 mm US photo needs about 602 × 602. If your cropped photo has fewer real pixels than that, the printer is enlarging it, and the result is the soft, slightly mushy print that gets described as "poor quality" on a rejection notice.

This is why cropping tightly into a small photo is a bad idea: you can end up with a 200-pixel-wide crop being stretched to 413. Start from a full-resolution photo taken from a couple of metres away.

Only one country in this tool publishes a required print resolution: the Netherlands, at a minimum of 400 dpi. Everywhere else, 300 dpi is a sensible working assumption rather than a stated requirement.

Paper

Several authorities are specific, and ordinary office paper fails all of them.

The US asks for "matte or glossy photo-quality paper" and rejects visible printer dots. The Netherlands requires "high-quality, smooth photo paper". Singapore asks for a matte or semi-matte, non-reflective finish for printed submissions.

Buy actual photo paper. A pack of 4 × 6 inch glossy or matte photo paper is inexpensive and is exactly the size most home photo printers handle best. Avoid heavily textured "fine art" papers — texture photographs as background noise.

Note that matte and semi-matte are the safer choice where an authority expresses a preference, because glossy sheets can produce reflections when scanned at the counter.

Ink and colour

Home inkjets drift. Two things go wrong:

Colour cast. A printer low on one ink cartridge will shift the whole print. This matters because a white background printed with a magenta cast is no longer a white background, and background colour is checked. Print a test page first and look at the white areas against a sheet of plain paper.

Banding and dots. A partially clogged head produces visible lines. The US names "visible printer dots" as a rejection reason. Run a nozzle check and a head clean before printing, and use the highest quality setting rather than draft.

Use a sheet, not a single photo

Printing one small photo on a large sheet wastes paper and makes alignment harder. Tile several onto one sheet instead — this is what photo labs do.

At 35 × 45 mm you fit eight photos on a 4 × 6 inch sheet and 32 on A4. Photos are butted edge to edge so neighbouring photos share a cut line, which means one pass of the blade separates both.

The print sheet on this site does this at the correct resolution and writes the right DPI metadata into the file, with faint dashed lines to cut along. Most applications want one or two photos, but several countries ask for two identical copies, and having spares is worth the paper.

Cutting

Cut precisely — the photo size is a requirement, not a guideline.

• A guillotine or rotary trimmer beats scissors by a wide margin.
• A steel ruler and a craft knife on a cutting mat is the next best thing.
• Cut on the line, not beside it. With butted photos the line is shared.
• Check the first one with a ruler before cutting the rest.

What a pharmacy or photo shop gives you

For roughly the price of a coffee, several problems disappear:

• Correct physical size, guaranteed, with no scaling setting to get wrong.
• Calibrated colour and proper photographic paper.
• Someone who has done it before and will spot a shadow behind your head.
• In Canada, the studio's name, address and date on the print, which is a requirement there.

The trade-off is that booth and shop staff are not always current on the rules — the neutral-expression question and the US smile allowance both get miscalled regularly, and photo booths in one country do not know another country's rules. If you are applying to a country other than the one you are standing in, take the requirements with you.

A reasonable approach

Take the photo carefully at home, crop it to the published measurements, and then decide:

• Applying to Canada, France, Germany, or Brazil? Go to a studio. It is the only accepted route.
• Printing at home? Photo paper, 100% scaling, highest quality, and measure the first print with a ruler.
• Not confident, or the application is time-critical? Take your correctly cropped digital file to a print shop and ask them to print it at exact size. You get lab-quality output without relying on their knowledge of the rules, because you have already done the measuring.

The check that catches everything

Whatever route you take, put a ruler on the finished print. If a 35 × 45 mm photo measures 35 × 45 mm, the hard part is done.