How to make a passport size photo
- Read the section below first — a PSK or POPSK appointment photographs you at the counter.
- Tap Choose your photograph and pick a front-facing picture taken against a plain wall.
- Tap Make passport photo — the frame is centred on your picture for you, so a front-facing photo taken against a plain wall needs no adjusting.
- Check the pixel size and the kilobytes printed beside the result before you save it.
You may not need a digital photograph at all
The instruction booklet is clear on this: no photograph is required for an application submitted at a Passport Seva Kendra or a Post Office Passport Seva Kendra. Where one is required, a computer print is not accepted, so a sheet run off at a cyber cafe will not do either.
The file this page makes is for the narrower cases — an application through a mission abroad, a police clearance certificate, OCI paperwork — where the screen in front of you actually has an upload box. If there is no upload box, close this tab.
Which of these numbers is a rule, and which is ours
630 by 810 pixels is the guidelines’ own figure, and so are the plain white background, the face at 80 to 85 per cent of the frame, the closed mouth and the absence of glasses. The 250 KB ceiling this page works under is ours: the guidelines state no file size anywhere, and we would rather show you a ceiling we chose than dress one up as a published rule.
630 by 810 is exactly the 35 by 45 millimetre shape, which comes out at 457 dots per inch on paper. That sum is ours as well — there is no official passport DPI to quote, whatever the comparison tables say.
What this page will not do for you
It cannot make your background white. A beige wall stays a beige wall, and we will not flood-fill it. It cannot judge your expression or notice your glasses. Stand a metre and a half from a white wall in daylight and get somebody else to hold the phone; the rest of it is arithmetic.