How to Make a Passport-Style Photo Crop at Home
You can crop a passport-style photo at home if the country's rules call for a square photo: take a clear, front-facing picture against a plain light wall, then crop it to a 1:1 square in Image Crop with your head centred and filling the right share of the frame. A US passport photo, for example, is 2 × 2 inches, which is a square.
Check the official rules for your passport before you crop anything, because they differ a lot. Some services want you to crop. Others, such as the UK's online application, tell you not to crop your digital photo because they do it for you. Cropping is also the only thing you should change: official guidance generally rules out filters and retouching. This guide covers what a home crop can and can't do.
First: does your application want a cropped photo?
Look at the official government page for the passport or document you're applying for. Three situations are common:
- Printed photo for a paper application. You'll need a print at an exact size. The US asks for 2 × 2 inches (51 × 51 mm), so the image must be square.
- Online application that crops for you. The UK's digital photo rules say to include your head, shoulders and upper body, and: "Do not crop your photo - it will be done for you." In that case, upload the uncropped original.
- Online application that lets you crop. The US online renewal lets you reposition or crop the photo inside the application, so you can upload your original and adjust it there.
If the photo is for a visa, ID card or exam registration, the size and head position may be different again. Many countries use photos that aren't square, so always go by the official page for that document.
What the official rules usually check
A crop can fix framing, but it can't fix a photo that breaks the rules. Using the US Department of State's guidance as an example:
- Background: plain white or off-white, with no shadows, texture, objects or lines.
- Head size: 1 to 1⅜ inches (25 to 35 mm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head, on a 2 × 2 inch photo.
- Recent: taken within the last 6 months.
- Unedited: no filters, retouching or apps that change your appearance, and no red eye.
- Quality: sharp, not blurry, grainy or pixelated. For paper applications, printed on matte or glossy photo-quality paper. Photocopies and scanned photos aren't accepted.
For online renewal, the US accepts JPG, JPEG, PNG, HEIC or HEIF files between 54 KB and 10 MB, in colour.
Taking a photo you can crop well
- Stand a few feet in front of a plain white or very light wall. Standing away from the wall helps avoid a shadow behind you.
- Face a window or use even light from the front, so there are no shadows on your face.
- Ask someone else to take the photo at head height, from about 1 to 1.5 metres away. Selfies held at arm's length tend to distort faces and tilt the head.
- Look straight at the camera with a neutral expression and both eyes open.
- Leave plenty of space around your head and shoulders. You'll crop later, and you can't add back what isn't in the picture.
- Use the camera's normal mode with no beauty filter or portrait blur.
Crop the photo to a square
- Open Image Crop and click the upload area to choose your photo. JPG, PNG and WebP work.
- In the Ratio bar, choose 1:1. The crop box becomes a square and stays square when you resize it.
- Drag the box so your face is centred left to right.
- Resize the box until your head takes up the right share of the height. For the US rule, a head of 25 to 35 mm on a 51 mm photo means the head should fill roughly half to just over two-thirds of the square's height, measured from chin to the top of the head.
- Leave a little space above your head and include the tops of your shoulders.
- Under Format, choose JPEG for a photo you'll print or upload.
- Click Download Cropped Image. The file is saved with
-cropped on the end of its name.
The tool doesn't draw head-size guides, so judge by eye and then check. One way: open the cropped photo, note the square's height on screen, and measure your head against it. If the head is too small, make the crop box smaller. If it's too big, make the box larger.
Will it be sharp enough to print?
Printers talk about DPI (dots per inch): how many image pixels are packed into each inch of paper. A common target for photo prints is about 300 DPI. At that density, a 2-inch photo needs 600 pixels on each side.
Image Crop keeps the real pixels inside your crop box, so the final size depends on how big the box is on your original photo. A modern phone photo is several thousand pixels wide, so a head-and-shoulders crop is usually well over 600 pixels. Problems start when you zoom far into a small or distant photo. The result will be small and may print soft.
There's no box in Image Crop for typing an exact pixel size, and it doesn't add print layouts. To print a 2 × 2 inch photo, place the square image in a document or photo-printing app that lets you set the print size to exactly 2 × 2 inches, or order a print at that size from a photo shop.
If the photo file is too large to upload
Some portals cap the file size. Run the cropped JPEG through Image Compress, keep the quality around 80%, and check the compressed size against the limit. Don't push the quality so low that the photo looks blocky, since blurry or pixelated photos can be rejected.
Your photo stays on your device
Passport photos are personal. Image Crop reads and crops the photo in your browser. It isn't sent to our server, and nothing is stored after you close the page.
When a photo shop is the better choice
A home crop works well for square formats and when you're confident about the lighting and background. If the rules ask for a non-square size, a specific head position measured in millimetres, or a print that must meet strict paper and size rules, a photo shop or official photo booth is often less hassle. The same goes if a previous home photo was rejected.
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