Digital passport photo sizes and pixel requirements

There is no such thing as the digital passport photo size. The portals that accept an uploaded photograph do not merely disagree about numbers, they disagree about what kind of rule to write, and that distinction matters more than any individual figure. Get the kind right and the numbers follow. Get it wrong and a perfectly measured photo is refused for a reason that looks arbitrary.

Three kinds of rule

A minimum with no shape. The United Kingdom asks for a photo at least 600 pixels wide by 750 pixels tall, between 50 KB and 10 MB, and then instructs you not to crop it, because HM Passport Office performs the crop itself (GOV.UK). The upload is raw material, not a finished photograph. A neatly trimmed file, which is the right answer almost everywhere else, leaves too little around the head for that step to work.

A shape with a range inside it. Canada's online renewal wants a 3:2 portrait image, at least 1800 pixels high by 1200 wide and no larger than 4500 by 3000, between 200 KB and 5 MB, saved directly from the original file, with the chin-to-crown measurement occupying 45 to 50 percent of the image height (Government of Canada). New Zealand does the same thing with different numbers: 3:4 aspect, 900 to 4500 pixels wide, 1200 to 6000 high, 250 KB to 5 MB, jpg or jpeg (Department of Internal Affairs). Here the file is the finished article and the framing is your responsibility.

No rule, because there is no route. France, the Netherlands and Australia all take a printed photograph. Publishing pixel figures for them would be inventing a requirement that does not exist. The French page explains why that country goes further still and requires an approved photographer.

What ICAO actually specifies

ICAO Doc 9303 is the document every authority points at, and it is more modest than its reputation suggests. The eighth edition says submitted portraits "should be 45.0 mm x 35.0 mm", with a minimum width of 35 mm and an inter-eye distance of at least 10 mm, and expects printing good enough to survive scanning at 300 pixels per inch (ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3).

Notice that those are millimetres. On pixel counts the document defers: final scanned images "shall have a pixel count as specified in ISO/IEC 39794-5". So the standard everyone cites for digital requirements does not contain them. That is the structural reason portals diverge, and it is about to matter more, because Doc 9303 Part 9 requires inspection systems to handle ISO/IEC 39794 from 1 January 2026 and issuing States to use it from 1 January 2030.

The confirmed numbers

These are the figures we read on the official pages ourselves, in September 2026. Look at the format column as carefully as the pixel column, because a correctly sized HEIC file is still refused by a portal that accepts only JPEG.

| Portal | Pixels | File size | Format | |---|---|---|---| | US visa, DS-160 | 600 x 600 minimum, 1200 x 1200 maximum, square | 240 kB or less | JPEG, 24 bits per pixel, sRGB | | US passport, online renewal | none published | 54 KB to 10 MB | JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF | | UK passport | 600 wide x 750 tall minimum | 50 KB to 10 MB | not stated on GOV.UK | | Canada, online renewal | 1800 x 1200 to 4500 x 3000, 3:2 portrait | 200 KB to 5 MB | jpeg or jpg | | Ireland, Passport Online | 715 wide x 951 high minimum | up to 9 MB | JPEG | | New Zealand | 900-4500 wide, 1200-6000 high, 3:4 | 250 KB to 5 MB | jpg or jpeg | | Singapore, ICA e-Services | 400 x 514 | up to 8 MB | jpg, jpeg, heic, heif, png | | India e-Visa | square, no dimensions published | 10 KB to 1 MB | JPEG | | Japan, Mynaportal | none published | up to 600 KB | jpg | | China, COVA | 354 x 472 maximum | 40 KB to 120 KB | JPEG | | Pakistan, online passport | 350 x 467 | 3 MB or 5 MB, sources disagree | JPEG or JPG | | India passport, missions abroad | 630 x 810 minimum, about 7:9 | under 250 KB | JPG or JPEG | | Malaysia, MyOnline renewal | none published | 100 KB to 300 KB | jpg |

Pakistan is the row to read twice: two pages of the same directorate disagree. One gives 350 x 467 pixels, JPEG and a 3 MB ceiling, the other a 5 MB ceiling. Sizing to the stricter reading satisfies both.

Two more rows deserve a second look. The United States publishes a precise pixel range for the visa route and none at all for the passport renewal route, which is the same government asking for two different things; the passport and visa comparison covers why. And Singapore requires the photo to have been taken within the last three months rather than the usual six, which is the shortest window in this table.

Canada adds a trap of its own: IRCC states on its own page that citizenship photos do not use the same specifications as passport photos. Reusing one for the other is a rejection waiting to happen. The Canadian requirements set out both routes.

Three famous figures that are not real

Part of the value of reading the sources is finding out what is not in them.

"ICAO requires 90 pixels between the eyes." Not in the eighth edition. Doc 9303 specifies 10 mm of inter-eye distance on the print and hands pixel counts to ISO/IEC 39794-5. The 90 pixel figure descends from the superseded ISO/IEC 19794-5:2005 lineage and is repeated as current far more often than it is checked.

"The India e-Visa photo must be 350 x 350 to 1000 x 1000 pixels." The official instructions give a format, a file size range and a rule that height and width must be equal. They give no pixel dimensions at all. If you have seen that range, you have seen a commercial summary, not the requirement.

"There is a Schengen digital photo specification." There is not. Council Regulation 1683/95, the uniform visa format, asks only for "an integrated photograph produced to high security standards". Each member state's national portal writes its own rule, which is why guidance claiming one European upload spec cannot be right.

Hitting a byte limit without failing a pixel check

Most portals set a floor in pixels and a ceiling in bytes, and those two pull in opposite directions. The order of operations matters.

Reduce JPEG quality first. Dropping quality from maximum to around 80 percent typically halves the file with no visible change on a face, and it leaves the dimensions untouched. Only if that is not enough should you reduce the pixel dimensions, and then only down to the published minimum, never below it.

What you should never do is send the photo through a messaging app to make it smaller. Those apps recompress aggressively and unpredictably, and the result routinely lands under a resolution threshold while looking acceptable on a phone screen. It is the most common way a good photograph becomes an unusable file, and the rejection guide lists it among the failures that have nothing to do with how the photo was taken.

Finally, remember that print and digital are frequently different crops of the same sitting rather than the same image at two sizes. Canada's digital aspect deliberately differs from its printed one. Take the photo with room around the head and you can produce either.