July 6, 2026

Visa photo requirements: sizes, formats and how to meet them online

Half of the frustration of an online visa application is the photo upload. The systems are strict, the error messages are vague, and the requirements change from country to country. Here is a practical map.

The two things every system checks

  1. Dimensions in pixels. Most systems demand an exact size or an exact aspect ratio, and reject anything else before you can even submit.
  2. File size in kilobytes. Upload limits between 50 KB and 240 KB are common — far below what any modern phone camera produces.

The most common formats

  • US visa (DS-160) and US passport: a 2×2 inch square photo. Online, that means 600×600 pixels minimum (up to 1200×1200), JPG, and under 240 KB. You can crop any photo to exactly 2×2 inches here.
  • Schengen visas and most of Europe, Latin America and Asia: the 35×45 mm portrait format — at 300 DPI that is 413×531 pixels. The 35×45 mm tool does the crop automatically.
  • India, Pakistan and several exam boards: photos between 20 and 50 KB, sometimes with separate signature files at 10–20 KB. The compress to 20 KB and 50 KB tools hit those limits exactly.

The photo itself

Requirements shared by nearly every country: plain white or light background, neutral expression, no glasses (or no reflections), face occupying 70–80% of the frame height, taken within the last 6 months, no filters.

Meeting the limits without losing the application

The safe workflow: take the photo in good light, crop it to the required dimensions first, then compress it to the KB limit. Doing it in that order preserves the most quality — compressing first and cropping later throws quality away twice.

All the tools linked above run in your browser: your visa photo is never uploaded to any server, which is exactly how it should be with an identity document.