Australia passport photo requirements

An Australian passport photo is 35 mm wide by 45 mm high, supplied as two identical prints, with the face measuring 32–36 mm from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head, on a plain white or light grey background. One of the two prints is endorsed on the back: your guarantor signs it and writes that it is a true photo of you. That requirement decides how you produce the photo, because it means the Passport Office expects a physical print that passes through someone else's hands, not a file you upload.

The frame and the face

35 × 45 mm is the most widely used passport frame there is. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland all use it, which is why a photo taken for one looks usable for another. Inside the frame they disagree, and that is where applications come apart.

A crop made to the British range can sit two or three millimetres below Australia's floor while looking, to the eye, like the same photograph. If you have UK photos in a drawer from a recent renewal, measure before you assume; see why the sizes differ at all.

Chin to crown means the bottom of the chin to the top of the skull — not the top of a bun, not hair volume, not a fringe standing up. Getting that landmark wrong is the commonest way a sharp, well-lit photo lands out of range; how head height is measured has the edge cases. Inside a 45 mm frame, 32–36 mm is roughly 71–80% of the picture height, but that percentage is our arithmetic rather than a figure the Passport Office publishes, so crop to the millimetres. The Australia preset crops to 35 × 45 mm and reports face height in millimetres against the 32–36 mm range; the photo checker measures a photo you already have.

What "endorsed on the back" means

Australia asks a second person to vouch for the photograph itself. The Passport Office's guarantors, referees and witnesses page describes a guarantor signing section 11 of your application and the back of one photo, in black pen, writing "This is a true photo of [your full name]".

Read what that certifies. It says the person in the picture is you. It says nothing about the frame, the face height, the background or the paper. A signature on the back does not rescue a photo that is out of specification, and a guarantor is not checking your crop. Every technical requirement here is still yours.

Guarantor eligibility is a specific list, it changes, and it differs between an adult renewal, a first adult passport and a child passport. We will not reproduce a list we could not read from the source; the current one is on that same guarantors page. Plan the order: print, check the print, then take it to be signed. If the photo is wrong, the signature goes in the bin with it.

The paper rule that decides where you print

The Passport Office describes an acceptable photo as clear, unedited and printed on high-gloss, heavy-weight paper. Its guidance for camera operators goes further: high-quality glossy prints of 200 gsm minimum, produced by photographic processes, dye sublimation only.

That is a materials requirement, and a home printer usually cannot meet it. Inkjet output on plain or matte paper is a different physical object from a photographic print — lighter, non-gloss, visibly dotted close up. Australia belongs with Canada, which requires a commercial photographer's stamp on the back, and Germany, which since 1 May 2025 accepts only digital photos taken at the authority or sent by the photographer.

So split the job. Compose and crop to 35 × 45 mm, confirm the face measures 32–36 mm, then send the file to a photo counter or print lab that prints on photographic paper and ask for borderless. Printing passport photos on 4 × 6 paper covers ordering, and the 4 × 6 sheet builder lays the copies out at true physical size. This layout is forgiving: two columns of 35 mm use 70 mm of the sheet's 101.6 mm width and three rows of 45 mm use 135 mm of its 152.4 mm height, so six fit with margin to trim into.

At 300 DPI a 35 × 45 mm photo is about 413 × 531 pixels; at 600 DPI, about 827 × 1063, and any recent phone clears both. The trap is that a browser-exported JPEG normally carries no physical density in its header, so print software assumes 72 DPI and prints your 35 mm photo at around 146 mm. This site writes the real density into the file; pixels, DPI and print size explains why that one number decides the size a print arrives at.

Why the two prints must match

Two photos are required and they must be identical: one photograph printed twice, not two shots from the same session. Frames taken seconds apart differ in blink, head angle and expression, and one of the pair is the one that gets endorsed, so a mismatch puts a signature on a photograph that is not the one being assessed. Print both from the same file, in the same run, on the same paper. If you reprint one because a corner got bent, reprint both.

Background, expression, glasses

• Background: plain white or light grey, contrasting with the subject, no shadows falling on it. Grey is often easier indoors, because a white wall lit unevenly reads as grey down one side anyway. Stand a metre off the wall so your shadow falls behind you and out of frame — see shadows and lighting and background colour by country.
• Expression: anyone over three faces the camera straight on, eyes open, neutral, mouth closed. No smile. The United States is the only authority in our verified set that permits one, closed-mouthed — see can you smile in a passport photo. Relaxations for young children differ by age and country; see baby and child photos.
• Glasses: not worn, unless you cannot remove them for medical reasons, in which case frames must not obscure the eyes and no reflection may cross them. That puts Australia closer to the United States, which has not accepted glasses since November 2016, than to the UK or Ireland, which allow them without glare — see glasses in passport photos.
• Hair and head coverings: nothing may lie across the face, hair or head covering alike. Australia's exact wording on religious and medical coverings we could not verify, so read it on the Passport Office page rather than assuming the rule you saw elsewhere; head coverings sets out what other authorities publish.
• No one else in the shot, including a hand steadying a child.

Two things we leave out deliberately: a maximum age for the photograph, and pixel specifications for a digital submission. Neither was verifiable here, and a wrong recency figure costs applications.

The word "unedited"

The Passport Office asks for a photo that is clear and unedited. Take that literally, because the software most people reach for when a photo looks slightly wrong is what it excludes.

Australia is in company. GOV.UK requires a photo "unaltered by computer software". Canada publishes a zero-tolerance list naming brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness corrections, background replacement, filters and AI tools. The US State Department instructs applicants not to change a photo using computer software, phone applications or filters, or artificial intelligence, and says it checks photos for AI use. Most passport photo services, meanwhile, lead with AI background removal. What the editing bans actually say quotes each of them.

Cropping and resizing are not editing in this sense; every authority asks you to crop to a size. Retouching your face and replacing what is behind you are a different act. This site crops, measures and checks, and never retouches. When the background is wrong the fix is to move — change wall, change distance, change light. The background check tells you whether the wall behind you reads as plain and even, which is what you need to fix it in the room instead of in software.

Before it goes in the envelope

1. Frame measures 35 × 45 mm on the paper — check the print with a ruler, not the file on screen.
2. Chin to the top of the head measures 32–36 mm on that same print.
3. Background plain white or light grey, even, no shadow behind the head.
4. Neutral expression, mouth closed, eyes open and unobscured, no glasses.
5. Both prints identical, from one file, on glossy photographic paper.
6. Nothing retouched. Crop and resize only.
7. Endorsement in black pen on the back of one print, ink dry, no ridge showing through the front.
8. Requirements read once more on passports.gov.au, since ours are second-hand.

The Australian Passport Office decides whether a photo is acceptable, and nothing here changes that. What measuring removes is the failure that stays invisible until someone else measures it — a face two millimetres short of the range. The checker runs in your browser, unlimited, without uploading anything. Our iOS app is free to download and gives one free export before asking for Pro; the website is the unlimited one. To build the shot from scratch, work through the at-home checklist and why photos get rejected.