How to take a passport photo with your phone

The short version

Stand half a metre or more in front of a plain, evenly lit wall, facing a window. Put the phone at your eye height about a metre and a half away — in someone else's hands, or propped on a shelf with the timer running — and shoot with the rear camera in ordinary photo mode, with portrait mode, beauty smoothing and the flash switched off. Take eight or ten frames, then crop to the size your country publishes. The rest of this page is why each choice matters, and which phone settings quietly change the image in ways the editing rules care about.

Whether a self-taken photo is allowed

This varies more than most guides admit, and it is not something to discover after the shoot.

• United Kingdom. GOV.UK plans for it. You may take the digital photo "using your own device during your passport application", and "you'll need someone to help you take a photo". It also says plainly that a booth or shop photo is more likely to be approved than one taken on your own device (gov.uk).
• Ireland. Selfies are accepted through Passport Online, and the upload must not be digitally enhanced (Ireland).
• Canada. Not available. A printed photo must be taken by a commercial photographer and stamped on the back, so a phone photo printed at home cannot satisfy it (canada.ca, and our Canada page).
• France requires a professional or an approved ePhoto booth. Germany, since 1 May 2025, accepts only digital photos taken at the authority or sent in by the photographer (France, Germany).

For the United States, the instruction that matters most to a phone shoot is about the file, not the camera. The State Department is explicit that you should not change the photo using computer software, phone applications or filters, or artificial intelligence, and that it checks photos for AI use (travel.state.gov). That shapes the settings advice below.

Distance: about a metre and a half

A phone held at arm's length puts the lens roughly two thirds of a metre from your face. At that distance the nose, forehead and chin sit much closer to it than your ears do, so they render larger and the face comes out broad in the middle, narrow at the edges. You cannot correct that afterwards without editing, the one thing you are trying to avoid.

Backing off to about a metre and a half fixes it. Three ways to get the phone there:

1. Someone else holds it — the option GOV.UK assumes for the UK online route. Tell them to hold it at your eye height, not theirs, and keep it vertical rather than tilted back.
2. Prop it and use the timer. A shelf, a windowsill, a stack of books on a chair. A phone looking up at you from a table adds a chin and shortens the forehead, distorting the chin-to-crown measurement the crop depends on.
3. Rear camera on a timer, screen facing away. You lose the preview, which is why you shoot ten frames and check them afterwards at full size.

Do not zoom to close the gap: pinching in crops the sensor and upscales what is left, softening the detail a sharpness check looks at.

Why the rear camera beats the front one

The main rear camera is normally the better one: larger sensor, more resolution, better behaviour in mediocre indoor light. The front camera also tends to use a wider lens, which pushes you back towards the geometry problem above. Resolution is usually not the deciding factor — a UK digital photo needs at least 600 × 750 px and a DS-160 upload is 600 × 600 to 1200 × 1200 px, and most front cameras clear both. What decides it is lens width, low-light noise, and the fact that the selfie camera is where phone makers put the most aggressive face processing.

There is also the mirror. The front-camera preview shows a mirror image; whether the saved file keeps that flip is a separate setting (on an iPhone, Settings → Camera → Mirror Front Camera; most Android camera apps have an equivalent). None of the authority pages checked for this site names mirroring as a rejection reason, but a flipped frame is software changing the image rather than recording the scene — a parting on the wrong side, lettering backwards — and the UK requires the photo be "unaltered by computer software" (gov.uk). The rear camera removes the question.

Settings that silently alter the image

These matter here because the authorities that publish an editing rule do not distinguish between an edit you made and one your camera made for you. Canada's list of unacceptable alterations names brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness corrections, filters and AI tools; Mexico does not accept retouched photographs; Ireland's upload must not be digitally enhanced. More in why you should not let software retouch your passport photo.

Leave HDR alone — that is exposure handling, not retouching. Switch the grid on: it keeps the phone vertical and level, and a tilted horizon becomes a tilted head once you crop.

Lighting, and the wall behind you

Daylight from a window, with you facing it, is the most reliable indoor light there is. It comes from a large surface, so it wraps around the nose and chin instead of carving shadows under them, and lands evenly on the wall behind you.

Overhead lighting alone does the opposite: a ceiling light puts your eye sockets in shadow and drops a dark band under the nose and chin. If one cheek is noticeably brighter, turn until the light is even or bounce some back with white card on the dark side. Avoid direct sun through the glass, which makes people squint and blows out the forehead. Avoid mixing a warm lamp with cool daylight, too: the mixed cast tints a light grey background blue or orange, and the fix for that is a colour correction, which is on Canada's list. More in lighting a passport photo without shadows.

Stand at least half a metre off the wall. That gap drops your own shadow low and out of frame; pressed against it, you print a silhouette onto your own background. Pick the colour by country rather than by habit: the UK requires plain cream or light grey and specifically not white, France forbids white and asks for light grey or light blue, the United States wants white or off-white, the Netherlands accepts grey, light blue or white. Choosing a white wall because that is what passport photos "look like" is how a UK applicant gets the easiest variable wrong — see background colour and the background checker.

The sequence, in order

1. Look up your country's size, head height and background on the size pages.
2. Stand half a metre or more from a plain wall in the right colour, facing a window.
3. Phone vertical, lens at your eye height, about a metre and a half away.
4. Rear camera, ordinary photo mode. Portrait off, beauty off, flash off, zoom untouched, grid on, timer on.
5. Shoulders square, head straight, eyes open and on the lens. Neutral expression, mouth closed, almost everywhere; the United States is the one authority in our verified set that allows a closed-mouth smile (smiling). No glasses for a US passport or visa (glasses), and clothing that contrasts with the wall (what to wear).
6. Take eight or ten frames, then review them full size rather than as thumbnails. Zoom to the eyes: if the lashes are mush, the frame is soft and no crop will rescue it.

The crop

Cropping and resizing is what every authority asks you to do, and it is a different act from retouching. What matters is the head height from the bottom of the chin to the crown — a physical measurement in millimetres, not a fraction you can judge by eye.

Everywhere else, the photo checker crops to the format, measures head height and eye line in millimetres against the published range, and flags sharpness, exposure, lighting and resolution. It runs inside the browser tab, so the file never leaves the device (where your photo actually goes), there is no limit on how often you use it, and it will not retouch your face. There are format-specific versions: the US passport photo, the UK 35 × 45 mm, the Schengen visa. The iOS app does the same job on the phone; it is free to download and gives one free export before asking for Pro, while the web tool is the unlimited one.

Printing adds one more problem: the physical size has to survive the trip to the printer, which is a matter of the DPI written into the file (pixels, DPI and print size, and printing on a 4 × 6 sheet). Whatever you produce, the authority decides. Nobody, this site included, can tell you a photo will be accepted; the honest maximum is to measure it against what the authority published — which is also the short answer to why passport photos get rejected.