Schengen Visa Photo Requirements: one 35 x 45mm specification for 27 countries

The most practical fact about a Schengen photo is one that consulate pages rarely state outright: you do not need a French photo and a German photo. The 35 x 45mm frame, the 32–36mm head, the light background and the six-month recency window are the same whether you are applying through Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid or Ljubljana.

That is because the format is not really a Schengen invention. It follows ICAO Document 9303, the international standard for machine-readable travel documents, which is why the same rectangle turns up in the UK, Australian and Indian requirements on the neighbouring pages of this site. Schengen adopted the standard rather than writing one.

The consequence for planning is that a strip of four compliant photographs covers a visa application now and another one next year without a second trip, provided the six-month window has not closed and you still look like the person in them.

Thirty-two to thirty-six millimetres from chin to crown, in a frame forty-five millimetres tall. Expressed as a proportion that is roughly seventy to eighty per cent of the height given over to the face, and it is a tighter constraint than it sounds.

Photographs taken casually almost always fail low. A picture where you can see someone's shoulders and a bit of the room behind them puts the head at perhaps half the frame, and cropping in to fix the proportion then runs out of pixels or clips the crown. The crown is the edge people forget: the measurement runs to the top of the head, not to the hairline or the eyebrows.

Both edges of the face must be visible and the head centred and square to the camera. A three-quarter turn that flatters in a portrait removes one side of the face from the frame, and a biometric photograph is not a portrait.

Glasses have been excluded from European biometric photographs since 2015. The earlier position allowed them provided the eyes were clearly visible, which in practice generated a long argument at every counter about whether a particular reflection counted as obscuring an eye.

Removing them entirely settled that argument, and it also serves the face-matching systems that read these photographs at borders. Frames occlude the region around the eye that the algorithms weight most heavily, and lenses introduce refraction that shifts apparent feature positions.

If you wear glasses every day, take them off for the photograph and expect to take them off again at automated border gates. You remain perfectly recognisable, which is the point.

The specification is common but the counter is not. Individual consulates and the visa application centres acting for them apply the same rules with different degrees of strictness, and some publish extra guidance on background shade — light grey is the usual suggestion, and it photographs more reliably than pure white, which tends to blow out and lose the outline of light-coloured hair.

Some centres also prefer photographs printed on photographic paper rather than run off an office printer, and will reject an inkjet print that visibly dithers. None of that contradicts the standard; it is the standard being enforced by someone looking closely.

Bring more prints than you need and check the specific centre's page before travelling to the appointment. The rules will match what is on this page; the housekeeping around them occasionally will not.

It cannot make one. A visa photograph is a biometric record of a real face, and an image model asked for a plausible person returns someone who has never existed. Submitting that to a consulate is fraud, and the fact that several sites rank for these terms by offering exactly that does not make it a service worth building.

It can help with the mechanical steps around a real photograph. Cropping to the 35:45 proportion with the head at the right height is exactly what a cropper is for, resizing to a portal's pixel requirement is exactly what a resizer is for, and both run in the browser rather than uploading your face to a server.

For everything that is not an identity document — a travel blog header, an illustration for a trip itinerary, a stock-style image you would otherwise licence — LaFoto generates original images from a written description, and none of it comes with the constraints a consulate imposes.