Australian Passport Photo Requirements: a size range, two prints, no retouching

Australia does not publish a single dimension. The photograph must fall between 35mm and 40mm across and between 45mm and 50mm tall, and anything inside that box is acceptable. Search for the requirement and you will mostly find "35 x 45mm" stated flatly, which is the bottom corner of the permitted range rather than the rule itself.

The practical effect is forgiving. A print that came out at 38 x 48mm is fine. A European booth strip at exactly 35 x 45mm is fine. What is not fine is drifting outside the box in either direction, and the common way that happens is trimming a print by hand to make it fit an envelope or a form.

The face measurement is where the tolerance disappears: 32mm to 36mm from chin to crown, a four-millimetre window. Because the outer frame can vary and the face cannot, the proportion of face to frame is not constant — compose to the chin and crown, and let the border fall where it falls inside the permitted range.

Australian applications are guaranteed by someone who has known you for at least a year and who meets the eligibility rules for a guarantor. That person signs section 11 of the form, and they also sign the back of one of your two photographs.

The wording is prescribed rather than paraphrased: "This is a true photo of [your full name]", in black pen. Not blue, and not a signature on its own. It is a small detail that gets applications returned, because the endorsement is functioning as a witnessed statement rather than a decoration.

The second photograph stays clean. So the pair are identical as images but not as objects — one carries writing on the reverse and one does not, which is why you order two prints from the same frame rather than choosing two frames you like.

The Australian Passport Office spells out what it means by retouching, and the examples are pointed: removing the background, removing moles. These are the two edits people make without thinking of them as alterations — one because a messy room is embarrassing, the other because it feels cosmetic and private.

Both are disqualifying. The photograph is a record of a face as it is, including the marks on it, and a background swapped to a clean white is a composite rather than a photograph. The rule is doing biometric work as much as bureaucratic work: the features an examiner and a face-matching system rely on are exactly the ones a beauty filter smooths away.

This is also why "AI passport photo" tools are a poor fit for an Australian application specifically. Generating a face is fraud everywhere. Here, even the milder operation of cleaning up a real photograph is outside the rules.

A plain light background, even lighting, a neutral expression with the mouth closed, and eyes looking straight at the lens. Hair off the face, no shadows, no head covering unless worn for religious or medical reasons, and no glasses.

The no-glasses position has hardened over the past decade across biometric passport standards generally, and Australia now sits with it: take them off rather than trying to angle away a reflection. An applicant who wears glasses daily is still recognisable without them, which is the concern the rule was written against.

Because a photograph cannot be corrected afterwards, the shoot has to be right the first time. Face a window, keep a metre or so between yourself and the wall behind, and have someone else hold the camera at eye level from a metre and a half — a phone at arm's length widens the nose and narrows the ears, and that distortion cannot be fixed within the rules.

Not a passport photo. LaFoto is an AI image generator, and an image model producing a plausible human face has produced a person who does not exist. Putting that on a travel document is fraud in every jurisdiction, and the Australian retouching rule means even a lightly cleaned-up real photograph fails.

The free browser tools remain the right answer for every neighbouring task where editing is permitted — a profile photograph for LinkedIn, an image sized for a visa portal that accepts digital uploads, a picture cropped for a membership card. Cropping to a ratio and resizing to a pixel target are honest operations on your own photograph, and they happen locally rather than on a server.

For the passport itself: a chemist, a post office or a photographer will produce a compliant pair of prints in about ten minutes, and your guarantor writes on the back of one of them. That is the whole process, and no software step shortens it.