Photos for an online passport renewal

The upload is rejecting the file, not your face

When a renewal portal refuses a photo without explaining itself, the cause is usually mechanical: a format the system does not take, a size in kilobytes outside the accepted range, or pixel dimensions below the minimum. Those three are the only photo rules the authorities publish as exact numbers, they are checked before anything about your head or background is judged, and they are the ones you can fix in a minute.

United States: JPG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF, 54 KB to 10 MB

For an online renewal, the State Department's upload guidance says the photo must be a JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF file, and that the file size should be between 54 KB and 10 MB. It must be in colour and taken in the last six months. Their servers block automated retrieval, so read it yourself at travel.state.gov before you rely on any third party's summary, including this one. HEIC and HEIF being on that list matters if you shoot on an iPhone, because it means you do not have to convert anything, and every conversion is another chance to lose quality (iPhone guide).

The 54 KB floor catches people. Almost every other size rule in this field is a ceiling, so the instinct on rejection is to compress — and compressing a 600 × 600 pixel photo hard enough takes it under 54 KB, at which point the portal refuses it for the opposite reason. A byte floor is a rough proxy for "enough detail survived the save".

The composition rules sit on a separate page: 2 × 2 inches, head 25–35 mm chin to crown, eyes 28–35 mm from the bottom edge, white or off-white background. A closed-mouth smile is allowed, the only one in this set, and glasses are not. See the US size page and the US photo tool; for a visa the numbers change again (passport versus visa photos, DS-160 tool).

United Kingdom: at least 600 × 750 px and 50 KB to 10 MB

GOV.UK states that a digital photo must be at least 600 pixels wide and 750 pixels tall, at least 50 KB and no more than 10 MB, in colour, and "unaltered by computer software" (gov.uk/photos-for-passports/digital-photos). The page carrying those rules does not name an accepted file format, so do not assume one is forbidden.

600 × 750 is a floor, not a target. A photo comfortably above it leaves you room to re-crop when the head height is wrong. The frame spec is 35 × 45 mm with the head 29–34 mm from chin to crown, a tighter band than most people expect, and an easy one to miss because it looks right on screen. The UK size page has the full set, the UK tool measures it in millimetres, and head height explains what the band is for.

Canada: 3:2 portrait, at least 1800 × 1200, and it must come from a photographer

Canada's digital specification asks for a portrait 3:2 image of at least 1800 × 1200 pixels, between 200 KB and 5 MB, with the head occupying 45–50% of the frame — narrower than anyone else here, since it fixes the aspect ratio as well as the head.

The rule that stops most people is upstream of any of that. For an online renewal Canada requires the digital file to have been taken in person by a commercial photographer, to be no more than six months old, and explicitly not a scanned copy of a printed photo (canada.ca). No file you make at home satisfies that, and that includes anything produced on this site. Our Canada tool is for checking a photographer's file against the published geometry before you upload. On paper the same photographer requirement applies, with the studio's stamp on the back; the Canada size page sets out both routes.

Ireland: at least 715 × 951 px, JPEG, up to 9 MB

Passport Online asks for a JPEG of not less than 715 pixels wide by 951 pixels tall, no larger than 9 MB, in colour, taken in the last six months. It must not be a scanned photo, must not be digitally enhanced or changed, and must not carry compression artefacts or barrel and other distortion (ireland.ie photo guidelines). Selfies are accepted for the online application, and uniforms — civil or military, including insignia — are not.

Ireland does not publish a head height in millimetres or as a percentage. Anyone quoting you one has taken it from somewhere else; the Ireland size page sets out what is published and what is not.

Why a scan of a print fails

Three of the four rule it out in words. The arithmetic rules it out again, independently.

A 35 × 45 mm print scanned at 300 DPI comes out at roughly 413 × 531 pixels: below the UK's 600 × 750 floor, well below Ireland's 715 × 951, refused on dimensions before anything else is considered. Around 600 DPI, or 827 × 1063 pixels, merely clears the floor. A US 2 × 2 inch print at 300 DPI lands on exactly 600 × 600, with nothing spare for a crop.

The quality loss is worse than the size loss. A print is a pattern of ink or dye laid down by a printer that has already made its own decisions about colour and contrast. Scanning samples that pattern on a second grid, producing moiré and paper texture, and re-saving as JPEG stacks fresh compression on whatever the original carried. Ireland bans compression artefacts by name. Photographing a print instead adds glare, keystone distortion — Ireland bans distortion too — and the colour cast of the room, which lands on the background a checker is about to measure for uniformity.

The fix is the same every time: go back to the original camera file, and if the only copy is the print, take a fresh photo rather than reproduce an old one. Pixels and DPI covers why a scan's DPI figure is not a quality measure; file size goes deeper on the byte ranges.

What the automated check is looking at

Before a person sees your application, software looks at the parts of a photo that can be measured, broadly in this order:

1. The container. Format, byte size, pixel dimensions, colour rather than greyscale. Pass or fail, no judgement.
2. Geometry. Whether one face is found and where it sits: head height against the published band, eye line, centring, tilt. The US publishes eyes 28–35 mm from the bottom of the frame; Canada publishes the head at 45–50% of the image.
3. Image quality. Focus, exposure, shadows on the face or behind the head, background uniformity, glare on the eyes. Shadows and lighting is where most home photos lose this, and background colour is where the rest do.
4. Signs of alteration. Every authority quoted above has a rule against it, and the State Department says it checks for AI use.

No authority here publishes the thresholds its software uses, so nobody can tell you the exact point at which a check flips from pass to fail. The practical response is to aim for the middle of a published range rather than its edge: if the head band is 29–34 mm, 31 mm leaves room on both sides and 34 mm leaves none. The machine can also be the last word — Italy's passport office software rejects automatically, with no operator override.

Fixing a file that keeps bouncing

1. Find the original. A copy that has travelled through a messaging app has usually been re-compressed and resized on the way. Pull the file off the camera roll instead.
2. Crop to the frame first, then check dimensions. Cropping is subtraction; a 12-megapixel photo can drop under a 715 × 951 floor once everything but the head and shoulders is gone.
3. Too large: resize, do not compress. Reducing the longest edge costs less of what the checker looks at than pushing JPEG quality down until artefacts show.
4. Under the byte floor: do not upscale. Re-export at higher quality from the original — interpolated pixels add bytes without adding detail.
5. Do not fix the lighting in software. Move next to a window and shoot again. This is the step that turns a size problem into an editing problem.
6. Keep the original untouched so you can start over when the portal changes its mind.

Why passport photos get rejected covers the failures that are not about the file at all, and the photo checker measures a file you already have against the published numbers.