How to take a passport photo with an iPhone

An iPhone takes a sharper photo than most booths, and it has one feature that ruins the result if you leave it switched on. The whole thing takes about three minutes and needs no app: the crop, the background colour and the exact size are done after you upload.

Two settings decide the photo

Leave Portrait mode off. The blur it paints around your hair is a manipulation, and an authority reads it as one. It is also one of the few things we cannot repair, because the detail at the edge of the hair was never recorded. Stay on Photo.

Use the rear camera, not the selfie camera. The front lens is wider and sits closer to your face, so it stretches the nose and shrinks the ears — the distortion reviewers see every day. The rear lens at 1× is the honest one; the 0.5× ultra-wide is not.

Live Photos, HEIC and ProRAW are all fine. We accept JPEG, PNG and HEIC up to 25 MB and remove the extras, including the location the phone writes into the file.

Take it in seven steps

1. Find a plain wall. Any smooth, light wall will do. Its colour matters less than you think — we replace the background with the one your document demands.
2. Stand a metre away from it. That gap is what keeps your own shadow off the wall behind you, and a shadow on the background is the most common reason a photo comes back.
3. Face a window. Daylight from the front, never from behind. With the window behind you the camera exposes for the window and leaves your face dark.
4. Prop the phone at eye level. A shelf, a stack of books, a mug — anything that holds it still, about 1.2 to 1.5 m away. Held at arm's length it comes too close and tilts.
5. Set the self-timer to ten seconds. Press it, step into place and let your arms drop.
6. Frame it loosely. Head and the top of your shoulders in the middle, a hand's width of space above your hair. We can crop inwards; we cannot invent the top of a head.
7. Take five or six. Blink, breathe, take another one. Only one of them has to be right.