How to take a passport photo with your phone
A modern phone camera is more than good enough for a passport photo. What ruins phone shots is not resolution, it is geometry: shooting too close with the front camera stretches the nose and widens the face, and a face measured from a distorted picture will not match the person at the counter. Getting this right takes two minutes and one other person.
Use the rear camera, from about a metre and a half
Hold the phone at arm's length and the lens sits roughly 30 cm from your face. At that distance the features closest to the camera are magnified — nose bigger, ears smaller, face rounder. Step back to about 1.5 metres and the proportions flatten out to what a portrait lens would give you. That means someone else holds the phone, or you prop it up and use the timer. Use the main rear camera, not the ultra-wide, and do not zoom digitally: fill the frame by moving the phone, then crop afterwards.
Light from the front, softly, from two sides
Stand facing a large window with the light coming from in front of you, not behind. A single hard source — direct sun, a bare bulb, the phone flash — carves shadows under the eyes and nose and puts a bright hotspot on the forehead. Two soft sources, or one window plus a white wall bouncing light back, gives even skin. Do not use flash: it produces red-eye, glare on glasses, and a hard shadow on the wall behind you.
Stand away from the wall
The most common phone-photo failure is not the face at all, it is the shadow behind it. Standing with your back against the wall casts a hard outline that no crop can remove and that a reviewer reads as a patterned background. Move at least a metre forward. Choose a plain wall in the colour the country asks for — white for Turkey, the US, Japan and Russia, plain cream or light grey for the UK, a light single colour for Germany and the Schengen area.
Neutral face, straight on, eyes open
Look straight into the lens with your head level, shoulders square, mouth closed and a neutral expression. Take five or six frames rather than one; blinks and half-smiles are easy to miss on a small screen. Then measure. ID Photo checks head height and eye line against the spec you picked, and also flags head tilt beyond about 12 degrees, a face turned off-axis, closed eyes, an open mouth, an underexposed or blown-out frame, visible blur, a busy background and a second person in the shot — the same list a reviewer works through.
Frequently asked questions
Can I take a passport photo as a selfie?
You can hold the phone yourself if you use the timer and prop it up at a distance, but an arm's-length selfie is a bad idea: at 30 cm the lens exaggerates whatever is closest to it, and the resulting face shape does not match you.
Front camera or rear camera?
Rear. It has the better sensor and a more natural focal length. Use the timer or ask someone to press the button.
Does portrait mode work?
No. Portrait mode blurs the background artificially and sometimes shaves the edge of the hair, which corrupts the crown position the head-height measurement depends on. Shoot in the normal photo mode.
What resolution do I need?
Any current phone has enough. What matters is the effective resolution after cropping to the head: for a 300 DPI print of a 35 × 45 mm photo you need roughly 413 × 531 pixels in the final crop, and a full-frame phone photo cropped to a face comfortably exceeds that. ID Photo shows the effective DPI and warns below 300.
Should I retouch the photo?
Remove nothing that is part of you. Adjusting brightness is fine; smoothing skin, slimming the face or removing a mole is not, The one rule here we can point to a source for is Korea's: it does not accept a photo whose background was replaced in software.
What if I wear a head covering every day?
Photograph it as you wear it. The requirement everywhere is that the face is fully visible from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead, with no shadow across the features.
Measure the photo before the counter does. ID Photo opens your picture in the browser, measures head height and eye line against the official spec of the country you pick, and lays out a print sheet. The image is processed on your device.
Measure a photo in the browser