Rejections are boringly repetitive. Six problems account for almost all of them, every one is caused by where the photographer stood rather than by the camera, and every one has a check that catches it before you pay.
Fix these six and the photo passes
- Step away from the wall. A shadow behind your head is the single most common rejection. An office treats the background as one flat colour; a shadow is a second colour. A metre of space between you and the wall moves it out of the frame. Our check for it is
uneven_lighting, and it looks at your face as well, because the same lamp that shadows the wall usually darkens one cheek. - Find a blank surface. A door frame, a curtain, a bookshelf, somebody walking past — anything with an edge confuses the separation exactly where it matters, around the hair.
busy_backgroundcatches it. We can change the colour of a plain background; we cannot reliably erase a room. - Stop smiling. Almost every document asks for a neutral expression with the mouth closed. A polite half-smile changes the shape of the mouth and the cheeks, and biometric comparison is measured on those.
not_neutralandmouth_openare the two checks, and a surprising number of photos fail both. - Leave space above your head. Frame loosely: head and the top of the shoulders, a hand's width of air above the hair.
crown_cutandshoulders_cutare unfixable in editing — the pixels above the head do not exist, and stretching the image to make room distorts the face. - Hold the camera still and get the focus on the eyes. Softness reads as a cheap copy, and a copy is what an official suspects.
blurrymeasures sharpness where the face is, not across the whole frame, so a sharp wall and a soft face still fails. - Look straight down the lens. A tilted or turned head changes the distance between the eyes in the image, which is the measurement every rule is built on.
head_turnedandhead_tiltedcatch the pose;low_resolutioncatches standing so far away that the face is too small to measure.
Ready to try it?
Upload the photo you have just taken. Every check runs before you pay, and the watermarked preview shows exactly what you are buying.
Start nowGlasses, head coverings and hair
Glasses are the seventh mistake and the most argued about. Some documents ban them outright, others allow clear lenses with no glare and frames that do not cross the eyes. Tinted lenses are refused everywhere. If you can take them off, take them off — the photo is valid either way, and the reflection is not worth the risk.
A head covering worn for religious reasons is accepted by most authorities as long as the face is fully visible from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead. Hair is simpler: keep it out of your eyes, and do not let it hide the outline of your face.
Both belong to your document's own rules rather than to a general standard, which is why every document page on this site states them with the date they were last checked and a link to the issuing authority.
Why a photo passes here and fails there
Every check we run is tied to the specification of the document you chose, not to an average. The same photograph can be right for one country and wrong for the next, because the head height, the background colour and the glasses rule are national decisions.
That is also why we show you the failing check by name, with what to change, before any payment. Re-uploading a better photo costs nothing, and the preview stays watermarked until you pay, so you never buy a photo you have not seen.
If you believe a check has judged your photo wrongly, write to us with the order number. A person will look at it.
Read next: taking the photo at home, or what ICAO actually requires.