Printing passport photos on a 4 × 6 sheet

Six 2 × 2 photos fill a 4 × 6 sheet exactly

Three across and two down, six 2 × 2 in photos cover a 4 × 6 in sheet with nothing left over: 24 square inches of photo into 24 square inches of paper. Build the sheet at true physical size, write the print density into the file itself, and print at 100% scale with borderless off. That is the whole job, and each step can be undone by one default setting, which is why home-printed sheets come back two or three millimetres small.

Build the sheet at true physical size

Start from the finished photo size, not the paper. A US passport photo is 2 × 2 in, or 50.8 mm square, head 25–35 mm chin to crown, eyes 28–35 mm above the bottom edge, per the State Department. A UK photo is 35 × 45 mm with the head 29–34 mm, per GOV.UK. Different photographs, not one photograph on different paper: see photo sizes and head size.

With the photo size fixed, the sheet is arithmetic. One inch of paper is 300 pixels at 300 DPI, so the sheet itself is 1200 × 1800 px:

The 35 × 45 mm layout keeps about six millimetres of spare paper on each side, so it survives a small trim. The 2 × 2 layout has none, which is why the borderless section below exists.

Treat 300 DPI as the floor and 600 DPI as comfortable. At 300 DPI a 2 × 2 photo is 600 × 600 px, the same number as the minimum for a DS-160 upload. The Netherlands asks for at least 400 DPI on prints, making its minimum sheet 1600 × 2400 px; the Netherlands page has the rest.

Our 4 × 6 template tool lays this out in the browser at true size with cut lines, and it never touches the face: no background replacement, no smoothing, no colour correction. Several authorities reject software-altered photographs outright, and the editing ban quotes them. The iOS app builds the same sheet; it is free to download and gives one free export before asking for Pro, while the website has no limit.

Why the DPI has to be inside the file

A pixel has no size until something declares one. When a browser canvas exports a JPEG, the JFIF header declares no unit at all, and a PNG from the same canvas carries no physical size. Print software has to guess, and it commonly guesses 72 DPI.

Work through what that guess does. A 1200 × 1800 px sheet read at 72 DPI is treated as 16.7 × 25 in of paper. Nothing you own prints that, so the dialogue scales it to fit the page, and on 4 × 6 paper it can come out right by luck, since the proportions match. On A4 the luck runs out: fit-to-page gives about 7.8 × 11.7 in, and every 2 in square becomes about 3.9 in. On US Letter, squares of about 3.7 in.

The fix is the real density written into the file, so "100%" and "actual size" mean the thing you designed. Our tools write it into both JPEG and PNG; pixels and DPI without the confusion covers the rest.

Printing at home: 100%, never fit to page

1. Scale: 100%, or "actual size". Not "fit to page", not "scale to fit", not "shrink oversized pages". That is the setting that resizes everything.
2. Borderless: off. A home printer does borderless the way a lab does, by enlarging the image past the edge of the paper.
3. Auto-enhance and photo correction: off. Driver features named "photo enhancement", "vivid" or "auto colour" change brightness, contrast and colour. Canada's list of unacceptable alterations names brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness corrections explicitly, and GOV.UK requires an unaltered photo.
4. Paper: photo paper, not plain. Ink spreads on plain paper and the print reads soft, a rejection reason in its own right.
5. Measure before you cut. A 2 × 2 photo must measure 50.8 mm on both sides; a UK photo 35 mm by 45 mm. Out by a millimetre means something scaled, and cutting will not rescue it.
6. Cut on the line. A guillotine, or a steel rule and a fresh blade. Scissors wander, and a photo cut short is undersized.

Ordering it as an ordinary 4 × 6 print

To a print lab your sheet is an ordinary photograph. Upload it as a 4 × 6 print, collect it, cut it up. Walgreens publishes 4 × 6 prints at $0.39 each for quantities of 1–99, and one print is the whole sheet of six; its passport counter service is a separate product at about $16.99 for two. CVS publishes photo prints "from $0.25" but no 4 × 6 unit price we could verify, so treat any figure quoted for CVS, Walmart or a UK chain as unverified. What a passport photo costs compares the routes, and drugstore passport photos covers what the counter buys.

Upload the sheet, not the single photo, or the lab fits one square photo to rectangular paper. Then choose the option that does not re-crop.

The borderless trap, in detail

The damage is two-sided. Take a 2% enlargement as an illustration; labs do not publish their overfill, so treat the figure as unknown and the direction as certain. The sheet becomes 4.08 × 6.12 in, roughly 1 mm goes from each edge, and every 2 in square inside it is now about 2.04 in. The outer photos are clipped and all six are oversized. For a US photo, where the eyes must sit 28–35 mm above the bottom edge, a millimetre off the bottom moves the eye line inside a photo that is no longer 50.8 mm tall. Neither shift is visible by eye.

In the Walgreens editor the setting to choose is cropless full photo, which puts the whole image on the paper instead of filling the paper with it. Other labs say "fit whole image", "no crop", "full image with border". The test is the preview: edges vanishing under the paper means the print will crop.

Cropless costs you nothing on this layout. A 4 × 6 sheet and 4 × 6 paper have identical proportions, so there is no mismatch to pad out and the sheet lands at exactly 4 × 6 with no scaling at all.

The safety-margin layout, and what it does not fix

When you cannot control the print setting, at an unattended kiosk or with an order placed for you, build the sheet with a margin instead. Lay the six photos as a block that stops a few millimetres short of the edge on all four sides, so the outer ring of the image is blank paper and the trim falls there rather than on somebody's forehead.

Be clear about what that buys. A margin protects the photos from being clipped. It does not protect them from being enlarged, because borderless scales the whole image by one factor whatever is inside it, and a 2% overfill still makes a 50.8 mm photo about 51.8 mm. Where the size has to be right to the millimetre, use cropless or print at home at 100% and measure it. The same logic makes a 35 × 45 mm eight-up sheet more forgiving than a six-up: the trim has somewhere to go.

Where a home print cannot be used at all

Before you buy paper, check that your authority takes a print you made. Several do not.

• Canada. The photo must be taken by a commercial photographer and stamped on the back with the studio name and date, so a home print cannot satisfy it however accurate the sheet is.
• France. It must come from a professional photographer or an approved ePhoto booth.
• Germany. Since 1 May 2025 only digital photographs are accepted, taken at the authority or sent by the photographer, so there is no sheet to print.

Where prints are accepted, the counts and the clock still apply. The UK asks for two identical prints taken in the last month. Ireland asks for four, sized between 35 × 45 mm and 38 × 50 mm. Mexico will not take a photograph more than 30 days old. One sheet covers those counts; the dates catch people, because a sheet printed today from a photo taken in the spring is still an old photograph.

Before you cut

Hold a ruler against the print. Edge to edge, a photo should measure what your authority publishes: 50.8 mm square for the US, 35 × 45 mm for the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Check the head, chin to crown, against the range on your country page. Look along the sheet edge for a hairline of missing image, the signature of a borderless print. Reprint before cutting: a trimmed sheet cannot be measured back.

Run the file through the photo checker first and you get head height, eye line, sharpness, exposure and background measured against the authority's own published range, then lay it out on the 4 × 6 template. No tool, ours included, can promise the photo will be accepted; that decision belongs to the issuing authority. Country starting points: US, UK, Canada, Schengen visa.