United Kingdom passport photo: 45 mm tall × 35 mm wide
The specification below is taken from GOV.UK — Get a passport photo: digital photos. The tool crops your photo to it.
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Every byte of that work happened on your own machine. Verify it: open DevTools → Network, and use the tool. No request carries your image, because none is made.
The specification
- Photo size
- 45 mm tall × 35 mm wide
- Head height
- 29–34 mm from the crown of the head to the chin
- Background
- plain, light-coloured, in clear contrast to you
- Digital file
- At least 600 px wide × 750 px tall. Maximum 5120 KB, minimum 50 KB.
- Accepted formats
- a digital photo file
- Age of photo
- recent
Source: GOV.UK — Get a passport photo: digital photos. Verified 30 July 2026. Requirements do change — if the figure on the official page differs from the one here, the official page is right and we would like to know.
What trips people up here
The UK is unusual in setting a MINIMUM file size as well as a maximum: at least 50 KB and no more than 5 MB. Compress too hard and it is rejected for being too small — one of the few places on earth where over-compressing is the failure mode.
A minimum file size, which almost nowhere else has
Nearly every photo upload in the world has a maximum size and no floor. The UK sets both: at least 50 KB, no more than 5 MB. The reasoning is sound — a file below 50 KB is very unlikely to carry enough detail for a reliable biometric match — but it inverts the usual advice. Here, over-compressing fails. If you have been reducing the file to be safe, stop; aim for the middle of the range and leave the detail in.
Digital-first, and the code-based route
The UK has moved further toward digital submission than most countries. Photo booths and many photographers now issue a code rather than prints, and you enter that code into the application instead of posting anything. If you take your own photo, you upload the file directly. Either way there is no physical print in the process, which is why the digital dimensions — at least 600 × 750 pixels — are the numbers that matter, not the millimetres.
Light-coloured, not white
The wording is deliberately not "white". The requirement is a plain, light-coloured background in clear contrast to you, and that word contrast does real work: if you are pale, or wearing a white shirt, a white wall gives you no separation and the photo can be rejected for exactly that. A light grey or pale cream wall is often the safer choice, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
Do not retouch it
The rules state the photo must be unaltered by computer software. Cropping and resizing to meet the spec are fine and expected. Smoothing skin, brightening eyes, slimming a face or any of the automatic "beauty" processing that some phones apply by default is not — and phone beautification being on without the owner realising is a genuinely common cause of failure. Check your camera settings before you shoot.
General advice on lighting, distance and expression — which is the same everywhere — is on the passport photo overview.