Prepare a photo for an online UK passport application

HM Passport Office accepts a digital photo taken on your own device, but it has to clear two mechanical checks before anybody assesses your face: it must be at least 600 pixels wide and 750 tall, and the file must be between 50 KB and 10 MB. An iPhone photo is comfortably large enough — until it has been through a messaging app, which is where most failures come from.

This page converts your photo to JPEG if it is not already one, and checks it against both rules. It does not crop it, and that is deliberate — see below.

What this page does, and what it cannot

Applied automatically, every time:

• Saved as JPG
• Kept within 10 MB
• Checked against the 50 KB minimum, and flagged if it falls under
• Checked against the 600 × 750 pixel minimum, and flagged if it falls under

This page does not crop or resize your photo. The HM Passport Office (GOV.UK) rules require it to be unaltered and say the cropping is done for you, so a tool that reshaped it here would be breaking the specification on your behalf.

Your job, because a converter cannot judge it. HM Passport Office (GOV.UK) also requires the following, and this tool has no way to tell whether your image complies:

• Taken within the last month
• Clear, in focus, and in colour
• Include your head, shoulders and upper body — do not crop it yourself
• Plain light-coloured background, with your face in clear contrast to it
• No other objects or people, and no red eye
• Facing forwards, plain expression, mouth closed, eyes open and unobscured
• No head covering (unless religious or medical) and nothing covering your face
• No shadows on your face or behind you

Common questions

Why does this page not crop my photo to 600 × 750?

Because HM Passport Office tells you not to. Its rules say the photo must be "unaltered by computer software" and, directly: "Do not crop your photo - it will be done for you." You are asked to include your head, shoulders and upper body, and HMPO crops from that. Any tool that hands you a pre-cropped 600 × 750 passport photo for a UK online application has broken the rule on your behalf — and 600 × 750 is a minimum size, not the shape they want. This page converts the format and checks the numbers, and leaves the picture alone.

It says my photo is too small.

It is under 600 × 750 pixels, and there is no honest fix. Enlarging it would invent detail that was never photographed, which is exactly what the rule is there to prevent. The usual cause is a photo that has been sent through WhatsApp or similar, which shrinks it silently — go back to the original on the camera roll.

Does converting from HEIC count as altering it?

Converting the container is not retouching the picture, and HMPO accepts JPEG rather than HEIC, so the conversion has to happen somewhere. What the rule is aimed at is editing — smoothing skin, changing the background, adjusting your face. This tool does none of that: it decodes your photo and writes it out as JPEG at high quality, with no filtering, and nothing is uploaded while it does so.