DOCSUPRA › Passport Photo Rejected · Español
Your passport photo was rejected. Here is which of the six reasons it was.
The short answer. A US passport photo is refused for six reasons: it is too small (under 600 × 600 px), the file is too big or too small (54 KB to 10 MB), the head is the wrong size in the frame (it must fill 50–69% of the height), the background is not plain white, there is a shadow or glare, or it is not a square. Five of those six are the FILE, not the photograph — and a file is fixable without taking the picture again.
You uploaded it, waited, and it came back refused with a line of text that explains almost nothing. Before you book a photographer, it is worth knowing that most refusals are about pixels and bytes, not about how you look.
The 6 reasons, in plain words
- Too small. Under 600 × 600 pixels. A photo taken at arm's length and then cropped to the face often lands below this without you noticing.
- Wrong file size. Under 54 KB or over 10 MB. Phones routinely produce 4–8 MB files, and some produce far more.
- Head the wrong size. Measured from the chin to the top of the head, it must fill 50–69% of the frame height. Too close and too far are both refused.
- Background not plain white. Off-white, cream, a wall with texture or a visible edge all count as not plain.
- Shadow or glare. A shadow behind the head, or a bright patch from a flash or a window. This is the most common one and the easiest to cause.
- Not square. The image has to be square. A phone photo is not, so something has to crop it — and a careless crop is what breaks the head size.
Which of them can software fix?
Five of those six live in the file. Size, dimensions, squareness, shadow and glare are all things software fixes on the picture you already took. Only the head-size rule can force a retake, and even then only if the original framing left nothing to work with.
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