Passport Photo Size by Country: Official Rules and One Photo at Five Sizes

The short answer

There is no single passport photo size. On the official pages we viewed on October 29, 2026, UK and Japanese passport prints are 35 mm wide by 45 mm high. Canada's are 50 by 70 mm, and a Chinese visa photo is 33 by 48 mm. Online forms count pixels and kilobytes instead.

Where a form lets you make the file, YouTube Thumbnail Maker sets the pixels in one step under Custom size, despite its name. In our check on October 29, 2026, one phone photo saved at China's smallest visa size, 354 × 472, weighed 34 KB. That is under the form's 40 KB floor; at 420 × 560 it was 45 KB.

Not every country lets you make the file. The UK and Canada say not to crop or edit the photo, and in Germany a photo service or the passport office takes it. A tool sets size and weight; background, head and light are yours to check, and the agency decides on acceptance.

Print sizes on the official pages

Sizes are width by height. Rules change, so check the page your application links to.

UK: gov.uk wants two identical prints of 35 by 45 mm, with the head 29 to 34 mm from crown to chin, taken in the last month. They must be “printed to a professional standard” and must “not be a cut down version of a larger picture”.

Canada: canada.ca wants two prints “50 mm wide by 70 mm high”, with the face 31 to 36 mm from chin to crown. A commercial photographer or studio must take them, and “We don’t accept photos printed at home or on heavyweight paper.”

Japan's passport regulations, on the government's e-Gov law site, draw a 35 by 45 mm frame for paper applications, with the head 34 ± 2 mm tall. The table is a scanned drawing, so we read the numbers off the image.

India: for a passport applied for in India, “Photograph is not required”; the Passport Seva Kendra takes it. Only children under 4 bring a “Passport size photograph (4.5 X 3.5 cm)”. Where an agency accepts a print you make yourself, the 35 × 45 mm preset in Resize Image has that shape.

Online forms: pixels and file weight

The UK's online form needs at least 600 × 750 pixels and 50 KB to 10 MB. For a photo from your own device, gov.uk says “Do not crop your photo”, since that is done for you. The photo must be “unaltered by computer software”. Our 3024 × 4032 test photo of about 2 MB met both numbers untouched.

Canada wants a digital photo only for an online passport renewal: a 3:2 portrait JPEG of 1200 × 1800 to 3000 × 4500 pixels and 200 KB to 5 MB. A commercial photographer takes it, and cropping counts as altering: “We’ll reject your application if the photo has been altered in any way.”

China's online visa form asks for 354 × 472 to 420 × 560 pixels and 40 to 120 KB, as a JPEG; on paper, 33 by 48 mm. At 354 × 472, the face should be 205 ± 14 pixels wide, with the crown 10 to 70 pixels below the top edge. These rules are an image on the form, so we transcribed them by eye.

India's e-Visa takes a JPEG of 10 KB to 1 MB, and “The height and width of the Photo must be equal.” No pixel size is given. Japan's eVISA takes JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or HEIC, says “up to 2MB is recommended” and gives no pixel size either.

US: form DS-11 asks for a passport photo “2x2 inches in size”, and the Diversity Visa lottery for a 600 × 600 JPEG of up to 240 kB. Our US visa photo article makes that square step by step.

Germany: under the Passport Act, a photo service makes the photo digitally and sends it to the passport office securely, or the office takes it. There is no file for you to send. A 35 by 45 mm print is allowed only when applying abroad, if the office there cannot take a digital photo.

One photo at five sizes: what the files weighed

In our check on October 29, 2026, we saved one phone photo at five of these sizes in YouTube Thumbnail Maker. It was an iPhone 6s shot of a mannequin head on a gray wall, 3024 × 4032 pixels and 2,029,264 bytes. We chose Custom size, typed the Width and Height, kept Cover under “How the photo fills the frame” and pressed Download JPG.

China's sizes came out at 33,952 bytes for 354 × 472 and 44,734 bytes for 420 × 560. The first is under the 40 KB floor however you count a kilobyte; the second is inside. Both sizes are 3:4, like the photo, so Cover cut nothing and scaled the whole picture down.

600 × 600, the Diversity Visa size, came to 60,648 bytes, about a quarter of the 240 kB cap. We saved the UK and Canadian minimums only to see the weight, not to send. 600 × 750 came to 76,021 bytes and 1200 × 1800 to 289,612, both inside their windows.

The page showed the weight before the download, “1.9 MB → 59 kB” for the square, with 1,024 bytes to a kilobyte. No file kept EXIF data: the phone model and capture date stayed behind. These weights belong to this one photo. Another picture at the same size will weigh differently, so read the weight before you send the file.

When the frame or the weight misses

Cover always takes the middle of the photo. For China's 3:4 sizes the middle is the whole photo, so the head stays where it was. The square kept the middle three quarters of the height, and in our file the hair ran off the top edge. India's e-Visa wants the “full head from top of hair to bottom of chin”.

To place the head yourself, crop first. In Crop Image, choose Custom under “Aspect ratio”, type the form's shape in “Custom ratio (N:M)”, such as 3:4 for China, and frame the head. Then pick Resize Image in the row under the download button, choose Exact pixels under “Set size by” and type the width.

A file under a floor needs more pixels, not compression: the larger Chinese size added 10,782 bytes. A file over a cap goes to Compress Image, where “To a size” takes a target in KB. It counts 1,024 bytes to a kilobyte too, so for a cap like 240 kB, type a little less.

What we could not read, and what stays with you

Australia is missing: on October 29, 2026, neither passports.gov.au nor dfat.gov.au answered our requests. The State Department's photo pages and the DS-160 visa site answered 403, so there are no pixel or weight numbers here for a US visa form.

None of these tools checks background, head size, expression or light. Our gray wall, for one, is not the white background the US and China ask for. The UK page notes that “Photos from a booth or shop are more likely to be approved than a photo taken using your own device.”

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