Passport Photo With an iPhone

Use the rear camera, not the selfie camera

The front-facing camera on every iPhone is lower resolution than the rear one, and iOS mirrors its preview by default — so what you see is not what you get. More importantly, the way people use it, at arm's length, is exactly the distortion the passport rules exist to prevent.

The rear camera at six feet gives you natural facial proportions and considerably more detail, which matters because the finished photo needs to survive being cropped to a square and reproduced at 1200 pixels.

The practical method: hand the phone to someone, or prop it against something at eye height and use the timer. The volume buttons on wired or Bluetooth headphones work as a shutter release, which is easier than sprinting back and forth.

Settings that matter

Turn the flash off. On-camera flash causes red-eye and throws a hard-edged shadow onto the wall behind you, and both are rejection reasons.

Turn Live Photo off. It is harmless in itself, but a Live Photo exported to the wrong format or with the wrong key frame chosen causes avoidable confusion when you come to upload.

Leave Portrait mode off. The artificial background blur it applies is a form of editing, and a synthetically blurred background is not the plain background the specification asks for.

HDR and Smart HDR can stay on — they help with even exposure across the face and do not count as editing in the sense the rules mean.

Framing and what happens afterwards

Do not attempt to frame it as a passport photo. Take an ordinary head-and-shoulders shot with space around you, standing a couple of feet in front of a plain light wall, facing a window.

Leaving room around yourself matters, because the crop to a 2 × 2 inch square with the head at a precise size needs material to work with. A tightly framed shot leaves nothing to crop and forces an upscale.

Our processing then does the geometry: it separates you from the background, places the head at the correct measured size and the eyes in the required band, and outputs 1200 × 1200 pixels. You do not need to measure anything yourself — but the photo you feed it should be sharp, evenly lit and taken from a proper distance, because none of that can be added later.