Canadian Passport Photo Requirements: 50 x 70mm, two prints, unaltered

Fifty millimetres by seventy is the outlier on this site. The UK, Australia, India and every Schengen state work from a 35 x 45mm rectangle; Canada asks for something appreciably larger and a different shape — taller relative to its width. A strip from a European photo booth is therefore not merely the wrong size, it is the wrong proportion, and no crop rescues it.

In inches it is 2 by 2¾. The number people most often confuse it with is the American 2 by 2 square, which is a different document standard entirely. If you hold dual applications in progress, the two sets of prints are not interchangeable in either direction.

Within that frame your face must run 31mm to 36mm from chin to crown. Five millimetres of tolerance in a seventy-millimetre frame means the face occupies roughly half the height — noticeably less of the frame than the UK or Schengen standards ask for, which is the second reason a European print does not transplant.

Each application takes two photographs, not one, and they must be identical rather than merely similar — the same exposure from the same session, printed together. Two frames taken a moment apart are two different photographs.

The photographs come from a commercial photographer, and the studio's name and address along with the date the photograph was taken belong on the reverse of one of them. That endorsement is what lets the passport office establish provenance, and it is the part that quietly rules out a home setup no matter how good the result looks.

The date on the back is doing real work. It is the evidence of recency, rather than a metadata field somebody could have set to anything, which is consistent with the general posture of the Canadian rules: they want a traceable photograph from a traceable source.

The requirement is that the photo be an original that is not altered or edited in any way. It is worth reading that sentence twice, because it is more restrictive than the equivalent rule almost anywhere else. Not "no retouching of your features" — no editing.

That takes out the obvious things: no smoothing, no blemish removal, no teeth whitening, no reshaping. It also takes out things people do not think of as editing, such as swapping a background to white, brightening the exposure to rescue a dim room, or running the file through a filter on the way to the print shop.

It follows that any tool advertising an AI-generated or AI-corrected Canadian passport photo is describing a product the issuing authority has already said it will not accept. This is the clearest case on the site of a keyword we can rank for only by telling people the opposite of what the pages around us are telling them.

A neutral expression with the mouth closed and the eyes open and looking at the camera. The face is centred and squared to the lens rather than turned, and hair is clear of the eyes.

Because the photograph is taken in a studio, the failures that dominate home attempts — a shadow on the wall behind, an uneven colour cast from a ceiling light, a lens too close to the face — mostly disappear. What remains is the human part: an expression that crept in, glasses catching a light, a fringe sitting lower than it looked in the mirror.

Ask to see the frame before you leave. A reprint at the counter costs a few minutes; a rejected application costs a re-booked appointment and a second trip.

Of the five countries covered on this site, Canada is the one where the honest answer is smallest. The rules point at a commercial photographer, forbid editing outright, and want a physical endorsement on the back of a print. That is a service performed in a shop, not in a browser tab, and pretending otherwise would be selling something that gets applications refused.

The tools here remain useful for everything adjacent to the passport itself — a headshot for a professional profile, a photograph resized for a visa portal that does allow digital submission, or an image cropped for one of the many identity documents with looser rules. LaFoto generates original images from a written description, which is a genuinely different job from documenting a real face for a government record.

If you have arrived here looking for a way to produce a Canadian passport photo from an existing snapshot, the accurate answer is that there is not one that will be accepted. Booking twenty minutes with a photographer is the shortest path to a passport.