How to Make a Passport Size Photo at Home and Print It

By the DocEpic team · Updated 10 November 2026 · 3 min read

Passport-size photos are needed for everything: passports and visas, but also school admissions, bank accounts, SIM cards and ID cards. A studio charges for a set and you have to go there. With a good phone photo you can make the same thing at home and print a whole sheet of copies at any photo shop or on your own printer. This guide shows how to take the photo, fix the background and print it at exactly the right size.

Take a photo that works

Stand about a metre from a plain light wall, facing a window in daylight so your face is evenly lit. Ask someone to hold the phone at your eye level and take the photo straight on. Look directly at the camera with a neutral expression, mouth closed, with your whole head and the top of your shoulders in the frame. Don't use filters, beauty mode or portrait blur.

Get a white background

Passports and most forms want a plain white or off-white background. If your wall isn't plain, Remove Background cuts you out of the picture and can put you on a solid white background in one step. Check the edges around your hair and shoulders before you continue.

Remove Background processes the photo in our server's memory and never writes it to disk.

Make the passport photo and the print sheet

Passport Photo Maker crops your photo to official proportions with a face guide and lays out copies on a sheet at 300 DPI, ready to print.

1. Open Passport Photo Maker and add your photo.
2. Choose the size: 35 × 45 mm is used for Indian passports and most of the UK, EU and Australia; 2 × 2 inch (51 × 51 mm) for the USA and for Indian visas and OCI; or type a custom size in millimetres.
3. Move and resize the crop box so your face fits the guide: head straight, eyes roughly in the upper half, a little space above the hair.
4. Choose the sheet — 4 × 6 inch photo paper or A4 — and how many copies, and tick Thin cutting lines if you will cut them with scissors.
5. Download the sheet. Tick Also download the single photo if you also need it for an online form.

Print at the right size

This is the step where most home-made passport photos go wrong. When you print, choose 100 % or actual size, never fit to page — otherwise the printer scales the sheet and every photo comes out slightly too big or too small. A 4 × 6 inch sheet is the standard photo-print size at any photo shop, which is often the cheapest way to get glossy prints; on a home printer, use A4 photo paper.

For online forms

Online applications want a file, not a print, usually with an exact pixel size and KB limit. For exam forms use the Exam Photo & Signature Resizer; for anything else, crop with Crop Image and check the size the form asks for.

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