Have you ever seen a passport? If you have, then you could have noticed that just like any other forms of identification, a passport also includes a photo of the bearer. A passport is an important travel document since this reveals your identity and nationality when you travel to a foreign country. And in order to better identify you as the bearer, your photo should be included in it together with important personal details such as your complete name, birthday, and citizenship.

However, since there are many people who are trying to falsify this type of document, the photo requirements for passport are stricter these days compared to other forms of identifications such as your driver's license, government ID, and office ID. This is to ensure that your photo is reliable when it comes to identifying you as the truthful bearer.

Passport photos should be of good quality to be able to represent the bearer accurately and should be free from common defects in order to avoid delays during processing. The following include the common passport photo print properties: it should be a 2 inch by 2 inch color photo, printed on thin photo paper or stock, clear print and with continuous-tone quality, and no enhancing, editing, or retouching done to the photo.

In addition, you have to make sure that your passport photo presents full head, your center head is within the frame, and the eye height is between 1-1/8 inches to 1-3/8 inches from bottom of photo. Your background for the photo should be plain white or off-white, no distracting shadows, and of course, you should have a natural expression.

You should be able to meet all these photo requirements when applying for your passport. Failure to comply with any of these will mean a delay to the processing of your application. That is why it is important that you have your photo taken by a professional photographer who knows exactly what the passport photo requirements are.