India passport photo size

For an Indian passport application, the size given everywhere we could look is 35 × 45 mm, portrait, on a plain white background. The 2 × 2 inch square you have been shown elsewhere is not somebody's mistake — it is a real Indian requirement attached to a different form. That square, 51 × 51 mm, is what the government's own photo document for OCI registration still describes, in detail, with pictures. Which size applies depends on which application is open in front of you, and the two are not interchangeable.

Why two sizes are both real

Two sites disagreeing usually means one is stale. Here it usually means they are describing different applications and neither said so.

35 × 45 mm is the most widely used passport frame there is — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland all use it. The square is the American frame, used for US passports and US visas. Indian applicants abroad often have square photos already, from a US visa or an earlier OCI card, which is how the wrong one ends up clipped to the right form. A square is not a rectangle with the sides cut off — the face sits at a different scale in each (why the sizes differ), and the India size page holds the preset this site crops to.

What the OCI document actually says

This part we can quote, because we read it. The OCI portal publishes a document called "Requirement of photograph for OCI Registration":

• The photograph "should be in colour and of the size of 2 inch x 2 inch (51 mm x 51 mm)".
• Full face, front view, eyes open, the whole head from the top of the hair to the bottom of the chin, centred.
• "The background should be a plain light colored background." Note what that does not say — it does not say white.
• "There should not be any distracting shadows on the face or on the background."
• Head coverings are not permitted except for religious reasons, and the face must be clearly shown from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead, both edges included.
• Glasses are not banned, but glare is: no tinted or dark lenses, and the eyes must not be covered by frames or hair. The US State Department, by contrast, has not accepted glasses since November 2016 (glasses, head coverings).
• Lighting even and balanced, diffuse sources preferred to point sources, no over- or under-exposure.
• Babies under one need not have their eyes open, and under-tens get some relaxation on face height and eye position, but the child must be alone in the shot — no chair backs, toys or other people — looking at the camera, mouth closed (baby and child photos).

One oddity: the body of that OCI document addresses "passport applicants" and describes the photo that will appear on the passport. The wording has plainly been recycled inside the consular system, which is part of why the square keeps resurfacing in advice about passports.

Head height, and the number nobody publishes

The OCI document gives one: the head should measure "1 inch to 1-3/8 inches (25 mm to 35 mm)" chin to crown — inside a 51 mm square, roughly 49–69% of the picture height, which is arithmetic we did rather than a percentage it prints. That is also exactly the range the State Department publishes for its own 2 × 2 photo.

For the 35 × 45 mm passport photo we have no head-height range we can stand behind. Figures circulate; we are not going to repeat one. Head height is the most damaging thing on this list to get wrong, because it is invisible to the eye, survives every other check, and is fixed the moment you crop. If your form gives a millimetre range, crop to it; if it does not, a centred crop with clear margin above the hair is safer than a tight one.

Chin to crown means the top of the skull, not the top of a bun, a fringe or hair volume — the commonest way a crop lands out of range (how head height is measured). The photo checker measures head height and eye line in millimetres against the preset rather than drawing a box.

Uploading through Passport Seva

We could not open the Passport Seva photo instructions, so we will not print a pixel dimension or a file-size band for that upload. Numbers circulate; repeating them unseen is how one wrong figure becomes twenty wrong figures on twenty sites, which is the mess that sent you looking for a second opinion. Take the pixel size and file-size limits off the upload screen in your own application, or the instruction sheet with it. To arrive there able to meet whatever it asks:

• Shoot much larger than you need. Downsizing keeps detail; upsizing invents it, and invented detail looks like mush close up.
• Keep the original. If the portal refuses your export, go back to the source image rather than re-saving a compressed JPEG, which adds artefacts around the eyes and hairline.
• Resize once, export once. Hitting a file-size limit shows how to land inside a KB band using JPEG quality instead of shrinking the picture.
• An upload is judged in pixels, a print in millimetres (pixels, DPI and print size). And never photograph a printed photo: two lots of noise plus a moiré pattern.

White, light, and the shadow rule

Secondary sources agree that an Indian passport photo wants plain white. The one Indian government document we could read says "plain light colored" for OCI, and adds the rule that does the real work: no distracting shadows on the face or the background. Those belong together, because a white wall is the easiest surface in the world to cast a shadow onto, and grey shadow on white reads as a patterned background.

Distance and light fix that, not a slider. Stand at least a metre from the wall — nearly every background shadow is somebody standing too close to it. Face a large soft source such as an open window, with something bright opposite to fill the shadow under the nose and chin, and no direct flash, which throws a hard rim of shadow around the head.

Shadows and lighting goes further, and background colour by country matters if you hold a second nationality: the UK wants cream or light grey rather than white, and France forbids white outright.

The sentence that decides how you fix a bad photo

The OCI document says it plainly: "Do not retouch or otherwise enhance or soften the photo."

That settles the question people arrive with constantly. If the background came out patchy or grey, the fix is to reshoot against a plain wall with more separation, not to paste a synthetic white one behind your head. India is not unusual: GOV.UK requires a photo "unaltered by computer software", Canada lists background replacement, filters and AI tools as zero-tolerance, and the State Department says it checks photos for AI use.

Which is why the tool here crops, measures and checks, and never touches your face or replaces what is behind you. Why authorities ban AI editing has the full picture, and the background checker reports whether your wall is plain and evenly lit instead of repainting it.

If you need prints

The trap in printing is scale: a file whose declared resolution is wrong prints at the wrong physical size while looking perfectly sharp. A browser canvas writes a JPEG with no unit in its header, so print software commonly assumes 72 DPI; this tool writes the true density in. Printing on 4 × 6 and the 4 × 6 template lay out a sheet at true physical size. For OCI squares, six 2 × 2 photos fill a 4 × 6 sheet exactly — 24 square inches into 24 — so borderless trimming eats the photos themselves. Leave margin rather than filling the sheet; the 2 × 2 inch tool makes the square.

Before you submit

1. Read the instructions on your own form first. They outrank this page, and they know which application you are filling in.
2. Confirm the size on passportindia.gov.in. 35 × 45 mm is our best reading of the evidence, not a figure we verified at source.
3. Square only for OCI, at 51 × 51 mm, per the OCI photo document.
4. Plain, evenly lit background, neutral expression, mouth closed, eyes open and unobscured, no tinted lenses, head coverings for religious reasons only.
5. Nothing retouched, softened or replaced. Crop and resize freely; leave the face and background alone. Why photos get rejected lists the failures that survive a casual glance.