100% on-device
US passport photo, made in your browser
The 2 × 2 inch square the State Department asks for — with the head height it actually checks, not the ICAO rule the rest of the world uses. No upload, no sign-up; your photo never leaves this tab.
The rule this document is failed for
The United States measures your hair. Almost nowhere else does.
ICAO — and with it the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and Japan — defines the top of the head as the top of your skull as if you had no hair. The United States is the exception: it measures to the top of the HAIR. That is not a footnote. On anyone with volume in their hair the two lines are a centimetre apart, and a photo cropped to the ICAO rule lands outside the American band. The second half of the same trap is the proportion: your head must fill 50–69% of the picture here, where ICAO demands 70–80% — so a European passport photo, correctly made, is too tightly cropped to be a US one. This tool asks you to put the marker on the top of your hair for this document, and says so on screen.
The specification, in numbers
- Photo size
- 50.8 × 50.8 mm (2 × 2 in)
- Head height
- 25.4–34.9 mm, measured to the top of your HAIR
- Head as a share of the frame
- 50–69%
- Background
- Plain white or off-white, free of shadows, textures and objects.
- Printed at 300 DPI
- 600 × 600 px
- Copies on one 10 × 15 cm (4 × 6 in) print
- 6 (3 × 2)
- Online — the online passport renewal
- send your UNCROPPED photo — the form crops it itself (54 KB–10 MB)
- Background colour the tool paints
-
#ffffff— only if you tick the background box, which is off by default.
Applying online? That is a different photo.
Renewing online? Upload an UNCROPPED photo — head, shoulders and upper body — and crop it inside the application. State says its 2 × 2 crop tool is “only when you are applying or renewing using a paper form”. File: 54 KB–10 MB, JPG/PNG/HEIC/HEIF. No pixel size and no aspect ratio are published.
From the form's own rules, last read on 2026-07-13.
What US passport asks for
- Photo is 2 × 2 inches (51 × 51 mm) — square, unlike almost everywhere else.
- Head 1–1⅜ in (25–35 mm) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head — and the US means the top of the HAIR, not the top of the skull. This is the opposite of the ICAO rule the rest of the world uses.
- The head fills 50–69% of the photo’s height. Applying the ICAO 70–80% rule here produces a photo that is rejected.
- Glasses must come off — no exceptions without a signed doctor’s note. Do not rest them on your head.
- Neutral expression, both eyes open, mouth closed. Taken within the last 6 months.
- The famous “600 × 600 px minimum” is a VISA rule, not a passport one — search engines conflate the two constantly. The passport upload publishes NO pixel size at all.
Every figure above comes from US Department of State, 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 US passport demands, the position from where it wants the crown. You do not pan or zoom anything.
- Download the single 50.8 × 50.8 mm photo, or the print sheet with all 6 copies on it.
Questions
Does my photo have to be 600 × 600 pixels?
That is the VISA rule, and it gets repeated everywhere as if it were the passport rule. The State Department publishes no pixel size for the passport at all — the online renewal asks only for a file between 54 KB and 10 MB, and any ordinary photo is. Search results that answer this question with “600 × 600” are quoting the visa page at you.
Can I upload this 2 × 2 photo when I renew online?
No — and the State Department says so about its own crop tool, in one sentence: “This tool is for cropping your photo only when you are applying or renewing using a paper form. Do not use this tool if you are renewing online.” The online system wants an UNCROPPED photo — your head, shoulders and upper body, with no aspect ratio required — and you crop it inside the application. So the square this page makes is the PAPER photo (DS-11, or DS-82 by mail), and it is the right one for that. If you are renewing online, upload your own photo; the tool checks it against the 54 KB–10 MB rule and says so.
Can I keep my glasses on?
No. Glasses have been banned from US passport photos since 2016, with no exception short of a signed medical note. Do not push them up onto your head either — take them off and leave them out of shot.
Why is the photo 50.8 mm and not 51 mm?
Because the authoritative unit here is the inch, and the millimetre is the rounding. Two inches is 50.8 mm exactly, and the 0.2 mm matters: three 2-inch photos fill a 6-inch sheet of photo paper perfectly, so a 51 mm photo no longer fits three across and the print sheet silently drops from six copies to two. It is also why 2 inches at 300 DPI is exactly the 600 px the visa form wants.
Is a US passport photo the same as a US visa photo?
The photo is the same 2 × 2 inches, but the visa system layers extra digital rules on top — a pixel range, a file-size cap and a stated position for the eyes. If you are filling in a visa form or the green-card lottery, use the US visa page instead; it opens the tool on that preset.
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: