How to take a passport photo at home with your phone

A modern phone camera is far better than the equipment most passport photos were taken on twenty years ago. What makes home photos fail is almost never the camera — it is distance, lighting and the wall. This is a setup you can repeat in about ten minutes.

First, check whether your country accepts a photo you took yourself. France, Germany, Canada and Brazil (for applicants aged three and over) do not. In those countries this article will not help you; a studio is the only route.

What you need

• A phone with a rear camera
• A plain, light wall — see below on colour
• A window with daylight, ideally on an overcast day
• Someone to press the button, or a tripod, or a stack of books
• About two metres of space between you and the camera

You do not need a ring light, a backdrop, or an app. Ring lights tend to produce a bright ring reflected in the eyes, which is its own rejection reason.

Step 1: pick the wall, then check its colour

Find the plainest wall in the house and look at it properly — not at your face, at the wall. Light switches, sockets, picture hooks, skirting boards and the faint texture of woodchip wallpaper all count as "not plain".

Colour is country-specific and worth getting right:

• France forbids white. It must be light-coloured — light blue or light grey.
• The US, India, China, Mexico and Nigeria name white.
• The UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the EU say "light-coloured" without naming one.
• The Netherlands allows light grey, light blue or white.

A smooth cream or off-white wall satisfies "light-coloured" and is close enough to white for the countries that name it. If your walls are all patterned, an ironed white sheet works, but iron it — creases photograph as texture.

Step 2: stand a metre away from the wall

This is the step people skip and it is the one that matters most. Standing against the wall throws your shadow onto it, and a shadow behind the head is one of the most common reasons home photos are refused.

A metre of separation makes your shadow fall on the floor behind you instead of the wall. Half a metre is the usual minimum advice; more is better.

Step 3: face the light

Stand facing a window, with the window behind the phone. Not beside you — that lights one side of your face and one side of the background, which shows up as a bright edge and a dark edge.

Overcast daylight is ideal because it is soft and even. Direct sun through a window is harsh and creates a hard shadow under the nose and chin. If it is sunny, hang a thin white curtain or net over the window.

Turn the flash off. Flash causes red-eye, blinking, reflections in glasses, and a hard shadow on the wall behind you — four separate failure modes in one setting.

Step 4: put the camera at eye height, two metres away

Two things matter here.

Distance. Phone cameras are wide-angle. Held at arm's length they enlarge whatever is nearest — your nose and forehead — and shrink your ears. This is the "selfie distortion" that gets photos rejected for not looking like you. Standing two metres back and cropping in afterwards removes it entirely. This is also why several authorities say outright that selfies will be rejected.

Height. The camera should be level with your eyes. Held low it points up your nose; held high it tips your chin down. Both are read as a tilted head.

If you are alone, prop the phone on a shelf or a stack of books at eye height and use the timer. Use the rear camera, not the front one — it is the better camera on almost every phone.

Step 5: how to stand

• Square to the camera. Both shoulders the same distance away.
• Head straight — not tilted, not turned, not tipped up or down.
• Eyes open, looking straight down the lens.
• Neutral expression, mouth closed. The US is the only country in this tool that allows a natural smile, and even there: no teeth.
• Take glasses off if you can. They are banned in the US, Australia and Mexico, and everywhere else they introduce glare and frame problems.
• Tie long hair back if you are applying to a country that requires visible ears — France and Nigeria both do.
• Nothing on your head unless it is worn for religious or medical reasons, and where that applies your full face must still be visible.

Step 6: take about twenty

Take far more than you think you need. Blinking is invisible to you and obvious in the file. Vary very slightly between shots. It costs nothing and the hit rate on the first frame is low.

Shoot at the highest quality your phone offers, and do not zoom — digital zoom just crops, and you want all the pixels for the real crop later.

Step 7: crop it, and check it

Crop to your country's published size. You need enough real pixels in the cropped area: for a 35 × 45 mm photo at 300 dpi that is about 413 × 531 pixels. Taking the photo from two metres and cropping in means the crop is a small part of a large image, so start from a full-resolution file.

Do not retouch. Skin smoothing, background cleanup and anything labelled "enhance" are rejection reasons in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Mexico and Singapore. Cropping and resizing are fine — Singapore says so explicitly.

The cropper on this site does the crop against each country's published measurements, writes the right print resolution into the file, and checks head size, expression, lighting and background on your device. It also tells you which rules a country has not published, instead of implying it checked everything.

If it still looks wrong

Nine times out of ten it is one of three things: you were too close to the camera, too close to the wall, or the light was off to one side. Move back from both, turn to face the window, and take it again.