How to take a passport photo at home

Stand about a metre in front of a plain wall, facing a window, in daylight. Have someone else hold the phone at your eye level, roughly two metres away, using the rear camera with portrait mode and flash switched off. Look straight at the lens with a level chin, a closed mouth and both eyes open. That single arrangement fixes almost every problem that causes home passport photos to be returned, and the rest of this guide explains why each part of it matters, so you can adapt it to the room you actually have.

Light: in front of you, never above you

The most common fault in a home passport photo is not framing. It is a ceiling light.

An overhead lamp sits above the face, so its light falls into the brow and drops the eye sockets into shadow. Authorities describe the result in their own guidance as shadows on the face and eyes that are not clearly visible, and it is the version of a photo that people find hardest to diagnose, because to the naked eye the room looked perfectly bright.

Daylight through a window solves it because the light arrives from the side of the room rather than the ceiling. Face the window, do not stand with your back to it, and stay out of direct sunbeams: hard sun produces exactly the deep shadows you are trying to avoid, plus squinting. An overcast day through a large window is the best light most homes ever have.

A check you can run in five seconds. Stand where you intend to be photographed and hold one hand flat under your chin, palm down. If a hard-edged shadow appears on your neck and under your nose, the dominant light is above you and you should turn towards a window or switch the ceiling light off. If the shadow is soft or barely there, the light is coming from in front and you are ready.

Switch the flash off. A phone flash sits within a couple of centimetres of the lens, which is the worst possible position: it flattens the face, blows the forehead and nose into featureless highlights, and throws a hard shadow onto anything close behind you. It also defeats the wall gap you are about to create.

Distance: further away than feels natural

This is the part that surprises people, and it is a property of the lens rather than of you.

A phone's main camera is a wide-angle lens. Wide-angle lenses exaggerate the difference in distance between the nearest and furthest parts of a subject. At arm's length your nose is perhaps 15 percent closer to the lens than your ears, and the lens renders that difference faithfully, which reads as a broadened nose, an enlarged forehead and narrowed ears. Step back to two metres and the same 15 percent becomes a much smaller proportion of the total distance, so the face flattens out into its normal shape.

A check you can run yourself. Take one photo at arm's length and another from two metres, then crop the second one so both faces are the same size on screen. Put them side by side. The change in the nose and forehead is not subtle, and it is the single clearest demonstration of why a selfie is the hardest route to a compliant photo.

Two metres with the rear camera, then cropping in, beats one metre uncropped. If your phone has a 2x or telephoto lens, use it from a similar distance. What you should not do is pinch to zoom, which is a crop performed badly by the camera app and throws away the pixels you will need for the resolution check.

The gap behind you

Stand at least a metre clear of the wall. This is not about the background colour, which our tool replaces anyway. It is about your shadow.

Stand against the wall and your shadow lands on it as a hard dark shape beside your head. Any background replacement then has to decide where you end and your shadow begins, and shadows are the boundary that is genuinely ambiguous. Step forward a metre and the shadow falls on the floor behind you, outside the frame, and the edge around your hair becomes clean.

The third check. Stand where you plan to be, look at the wall behind you, and step forward until you can no longer see your own shadow on it. That distance is the gap you want.

Four camera settings

Most phone cameras are configured for flattering social photos, which is close to the opposite of what a passport office wants.

Portrait or depth mode: off. It estimates a boundary around you and blurs everything outside it. That estimate is guesswork at fine detail, so single hairs, glasses arms and ear edges get chewed or smeared. It also softens the background in a way that can look like an uneven backdrop.

Beauty, smoothing or face-retouch filters: off. Skin smoothing alters facial features, which is precisely what a photo standard exists to prevent. Some phones apply a mild version by default in the front camera, which is one more reason to use the rear one.

Flash: off. As above.

Resolution: highest, and no digital zoom. A passport photo needs enough pixels for the print size or the portal's minimum, and every crop spends some of them. Shoot at the sensor's full resolution and crop afterwards, rather than zooming while shooting.

One more thing that is not a setting: send the file to yourself in a way that does not recompress it. Messaging apps shrink images aggressively, and a photo that looked fine on the phone can arrive too small and too soft to pass a resolution check. Use the original file from the gallery.

Pose

Square your shoulders to the camera and keep your chin level, neither lifted nor tucked. Both eyes open, looking directly at the lens. Mouth closed, expression neutral: this is a specific requirement rather than a stylistic preference in most countries, and the rules on smiling differ more than people expect.

Push hair back from your face so that both eyes and the outline of your face are clear. Take off glasses unless you hold a medical exemption, since most authorities now require them to be removed. If you wear a head covering for religious or medical reasons, the face must still be visible from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead, and some countries want a written statement with the application.

Take five or six frames rather than one. Blinking and small head tilts are invisible in the moment and obvious in the file, and it costs nothing to have spares.

Then let the measuring happen

What remains is arithmetic: the head has to occupy a specified proportion of the frame, the eyes have to sit within a band measured from the bottom edge, and the whole thing has to be cut to a size in millimetres or pixels that varies by country and by document. That is what this site does, in your browser, without the photo going anywhere.

If a check fails, the message names one thing to change. The reasons photos get rejected covers what each of those failures looks like in practice, what to wear deals with clothing and contrast against the background, and if you are photographing a baby, the infant guide describes a completely different method, because none of the advice above works on someone who cannot sit up.