2026-08-15

How to make your own passport photo at home — the exact size it has to be

The U.S. State Department issued 27.3 million passports in fiscal year 2025 — a record, and nearly three million more than the previous record of 24.5 million set just one year before. A lot of those people are about to find out passport photos aren't free: CVS charges $17.99 and Walgreens charges $16.99 for two prints, per both companies' own websites. What almost nobody checks first is that the actual rules for what the photo has to look like are published, specific, and entirely possible to hit yourself with a phone camera and a plain wall — no studio required.

What a compliant photo actually has to look like

Per the State Department's own published specs at travel.state.gov, a passport photo has two possible forms, each with its own exact numbers:

• Printed photo (for a mailed application): exactly 2×2 inches (51×51mm), with your head — measured from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head — between 1 and 1⅛ inches (25–35mm).
• Digital photo (for online renewal): a square image between 600×600 and 1200×1200 pixels, as a file between 54 KB and 10 MB.

Both forms share the same content rules: a plain white or off-white background with no shadows, texture, or objects behind you (the State Department's own suggestion for a home setup is a white blanket or sheet draped over whatever wall you've actually got), a color photo taken within the last six months, and a neutral expression — both eyes open, mouth closed, facing the camera directly.

The trap: the online renewal tool wants your original, unedited file

Here's the part that's easy to miss. The State Department's photo guidance says to submit the original, unedited photo file, with no filters or digital changes — but it also carves out an explicit exception for its own Online Passport Renewal (OPR) system: that tool lets you reposition and crop the photo yourself, inside the application, after you upload it. More than 2 million Americans have used OPR since its 2025 rollout, and nearly half of all renewals are now done through it, so this isn't a rare edge case. The practical upshot: if you're renewing online through OPR, upload the straight-off-the-camera photo and let their own cropping step do the framing — pre-cropping and pre-resizing the file yourself before that upload isn't what the tool's own instructions describe. The DIY method below is for producing your own compliant photo file for everything else: a mailed DS-11/DS-82 application, a photo you're handing to someone else, or just a file that already meets spec on its own.

The DIY method, once you know it's not for OPR

1. Set up the background. Stand a couple of feet in front of a plain white wall, or drape a white sheet or blanket behind you if your wall isn't white — the same fix the State Department itself suggests. Take the photo with even, front-facing light and no flash-shadow behind you.
2. Crop to a 1:1 square. NearIMG's Crop tool has a 1:1 preset built in for exactly this shape. Position the box so your head, from chin to the top of your hair, fills roughly two-thirds of the frame — that's the visual target for the 1–1⅛-inch head-size rule, and it's still a judgment call you have to make by eye; the tool draws the box, it doesn't measure your head for you.
3. Resize to an exact pixel size. Set both width and height to the same number between 600 and 1200 — 900×900 sits safely in the middle of that range — using NearIMG's Resize tool with exact dimensions rather than a percentage scale.
4. Convert to JPG. A plain JPG is the safest, smallest, most universally accepted output for a photo like this, and it's what the walk-in options hand you anyway. NearIMG's Convert-to-JPG tool takes PNG, WebP, GIF, or BMP as the source — and HEIC too, so the photo straight off your iPhone drops in as-is. The old trick of sharing it through Messages or email first just to get a JPEG isn't needed here: HEIC files are decoded right in the browser, in every browser, not just Safari.

If the background ended up a little dim or uneven, NearIMG's Adjust tool can nudge brightness and contrast before you export — it won't erase a bad background, but it can even out lighting that's close but not quite flat.

What this doesn't check for you

Being straightforward about the limits: NearIMG doesn't detect faces or measure head size, so the 1–1⅛-inch rule is still something you eyeball, not something the tool verifies for you. There's no background-removal feature here either — a real plain wall (or a real sheet draped over one) is doing that work, not software. And meeting the size and background spec doesn't guarantee acceptance on its own; comparing the result against the State Department's own example photos before you submit or print is still worth the minute it takes.

The short version

Passport demand hit a record 27.3 million issued in fiscal year 2025, and a walk-in photo runs $17–18 at either CVS or Walgreens by their own pricing. The actual specs — 2×2in prints with a 1–1⅛-inch head, or a 600–1200px square digital file, both against a plain white background — are published by the State Department and simple enough to hit yourself with a phone and a white wall, using Crop's 1:1 preset, Resize's exact pixel dimensions, and Convert-to-JPG. The one place to stop and not do this yourself is the Online Passport Renewal upload step, which wants your original file untouched so its own tool can do the cropping.