100% on-device
UK passport photo, made in your browser
The Home Office’s 35 × 45 mm — with its own head band and its own background colour, both of which differ from the European photo of identical size. No upload, no sign-up.
The rule this document is failed for
The UK does not want a white background — and its head band is not Schengen’s.
Two traps, and they both hide behind the fact that a UK photo is the same 35 × 45 mm as a European one, so it looks interchangeable and is not. First, the background: the Home Office asks for plain CREAM or LIGHT GREY, and a pure white background — the thing everybody assumes a passport photo has — is a common reason for rejection. Second, the head: 29–34 mm, where Schengen wants 32–36 mm. Those bands overlap only in the middle, so a correctly made German photo can be a correctly rejected British one, at exactly the same size. This tool crops to the UK band, and if you switch its background replacement on, it paints cream rather than white — because it knows which document you picked.
The specification, in numbers
- Photo size
- 35 × 45 mm
- Head height
- 29–34 mm, measured to the top of your skull — hair is ignored
- Head as a share of the frame
- 64–76%
- Background
- Plain cream or light grey — the UK does NOT want a white background.
- Printed at 300 DPI
- 413 × 531 px
- Copies on one 10 × 15 cm (4 × 6 in) print
- 8 (4 × 2)
- Online — the online passport application
- send your UNCROPPED photo — the form crops it itself (600 × 750 px, 50 KB–10 MB)
- Background colour the tool paints
-
#ece7dc— only if you tick the background box, which is off by default.
Applying online? That is a different photo.
Online applications: upload your UNCROPPED head, shoulders and upper body — the Passport Office does the cropping. At least 600 × 750 px, 50 KB–10 MB, in colour, unedited. (The UK VISA form is a different document: same pixels, but 6 MB and JPEG only.)
From the form's own rules, last read on 2026-07-13.
What UK passport asks for
- Head 29–34 mm from the crown to the chin — a narrower band than Schengen’s 32–36 mm, in a photo of exactly the same size. A Schengen crop is not automatically a UK crop.
- “The crown” is defined by the Home Office as the top of the head, NOT the top of the hair.
- Background must be plain cream or light grey (about 5–10% grey). A pure white background is a common rejection reason.
- The photo must have been taken in the last MONTH — far tighter than the 6 months most countries allow.
- Plain expression, mouth closed, no hair across the eyes, no head tilt.
- THE TWO ROUTES ARE DIFFERENT PHOTOS. On paper, you send this 35 × 45 mm print. Online, you send an UNCROPPED head-and-shoulders photo and the Passport Office crops it for you — so the crop below is for the paper application, and uploading it to the online form would break the form’s own instruction.
Every figure above comes from GOV.UK — HM Passport Office, last read on 2026-07-13. These rules do change; if you are reading this long after that date, spend a minute on the source page.
How it works
- Drop in a photo. It is read straight into this tab. There is no upload.
- Mark three points — the top of your head, your chin, the middle of your face. From those the crop is fully determined: the scale comes from the head height UK passport demands, the position from where it wants the crown. You do not pan or zoom anything.
- Download the single 35 × 45 mm photo, or the print sheet with all 8 copies on it.
Questions
Can I use a Schengen photo for my UK passport?
Not safely. It is the same 35 × 45 mm sheet of paper, but the head band is different — 29–34 mm here against 32–36 mm there — and so is the background colour. A photo can be perfectly compliant for one and rejected by the other. Pick the document first and crop for it; that is the whole reason this page is separate from the Schengen one.
Really, not white?
Really. GOV.UK asks for a plain cream or light grey background — roughly 5–10% grey. It is one of the most-cited rejection reasons precisely because white feels like the obvious, safe choice.
How recent does the photo have to be?
Taken within the last MONTH. Most countries allow six; the UK does not, so an old photo that would sail through elsewhere is not usable here.
What does “the crown of the head” mean?
The top of your head, not the top of your hair — the Home Office follows the ICAO definition, so hair volume is ignored. (The United States is the odd one out and measures the hair.) The tool tells you which line you are marking, for the document you chose.
Can I use this for the online application?
For the paper application, yes — that is exactly the photo it makes. For the ONLINE application, no, and the reason is not the one you would expect. It is not that the file is too small. It is that the Passport Office does not want a cropped photo at all: “include your head, shoulders and upper body. Do not crop your photo — it will be done for you.” They crop it themselves. So the file to upload is your own uncropped photograph, and the tool now checks it against the rules that actually apply to it — at least 600 × 750 px, 50 KB–10 MB — and tells you whether it passes. It would have been easy to “fix” this by raising the export resolution until it cleared 600 × 750. That would have handed you a perfectly-sized photo that breaks the form’s own instruction, which is worse than doing nothing.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
It is not uploaded — and that is a fact of how the tool is built, not a promise in a privacy policy. There is no upload endpoint. The photo is read straight into this browser tab and cropped by code running on your own machine; you can pull out your Wi-Fi halfway through and it will still finish. Given that a passport photo is your face attached to a government form, that is the only honest way to build this.
How do I get it printed?
Download the print sheet and hand it to any photo lab as an ordinary 10 × 15 cm (4 × 6 in) print — it costs small change and comes back on real photo paper with the cut guides on it. If you print at home, print at 100% scale and never “fit to page”: that quietly rescales the sheet and makes every millimetre on it wrong.
Other documents
The same tool knows all of them — pick one from the dropdown above, or start from its own page: