About

An independent site with one job

Government photo requirements are scattered across form instructions, help pages and an adjudication manual, and most photo websites paper over the gaps with figures borrowed from other forms. Immigration Photo exists to do one thing carefully: state the actual published rule for each US document, prove where it came from, and give you a free tool that checks your photo against it.

How every requirement gets verified

Every figure on this site was read from an official Department of State or USCIS source: travel.state.gov, the Foreign Affairs Manual (8 FAM 402.1), uscis.gov form pages, and the official form instructions themselves. Each requirement is recorded with a verbatim quote and the date it was checked, then independently re-audited before publishing. The sources page lists every citation, including the places where government sources contradict each other.

The discipline that makes this site different is what we refuse to publish. When an official source specifies no figure, the page says "Not specified by the official source" instead of borrowing a number from a different form. There is, for example, no eye-height rule for a US passport photo and no DPI rule for printed passport photos. Sites that publish those figures are quoting the visa specification without saying so.

Illustration: hands checking a printed document against an official webpage on a laptop — The method in one picture: every figure is read in the official source, quoted, and dated. (Illustration)

How the tool works

The photo checker runs entirely in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded to a server, we never see it, and there is no account. The check compares your file against the figures your document actually publishes, and the fix crops, resizes and compresses within those same published rules. It does not retouch your face, because the rules prohibit it.

What this site is not

Immigration Photo is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of State, USCIS, or any government agency, and nothing here is legal advice. Requirements change; every page shows the date its rule was last checked, and final acceptance of any photo is always at the discretion of the agency processing your application.

Contact

Found an error, or a source that changed? Tell us and we will re-verify it: [email protected]. Corrections to published figures take priority over everything else.