China Visa Photo Size & Requirements

This page covers the photo requirements for a Chinese visa application through CVASC (the Chinese Visa Application Service Center), the process most foreign applicants outside China use. It's a separate spec from the domestic passport photo Chinese citizens submit, which this page doesn't cover.

CVASC's own published FAQ allows glasses, as long as the lenses aren't thick-rimmed, tinted, or glare-reflecting — that's what this tool follows. Some third-party sources claim glasses were banned outright for the newer COVA online application channel starting in 2024, but that isn't confirmed against a primary source for that specific channel. If you're applying online through COVA, it's safer to remove your glasses just in case.

Nearly every passport and visa photo standard in the world constrains one dimension of your head: the chin-to-crown height. The Chinese visa specification constrains two. Head height must be 28 to 33mm, and head width must be 15 to 22mm.

Most of the time the second constraint takes care of itself, because a human head has a fairly consistent width-to-height ratio and a crop that satisfies one will usually satisfy the other. Where it stops being automatic is when hair is involved. The width is measured across the head, and a wide hairstyle, a high volume curl, or hair worn loose and pushed out at the sides can take you past 22mm while your face itself is perfectly placed. Tying hair back or tucking it behind the shoulders solves it.

33 × 48mm is a size nobody else uses, and the proportions are the reason: at a ratio of 0.6875 it is notably narrower relative to its height than the 35 × 45mm rectangle used across Europe. A European-spec photo will be too wide and too short. The cropper here exports at 594 × 864 pixels, about 457 DPI at print size.

Another unusual piece of precision: the specification puts numbers on how far your head may deviate from straight. No more than 20 degrees of rotation left or right, and no more than 25 degrees up or down.

Those are generous allowances in the abstract — 20 degrees is a visible turn, not a hair’s breadth — but they are easy to exceed accidentally when someone else is taking the photo and the camera is not at your eye level. Holding a phone at chest height and shooting upward tips your head back relative to the lens; standing on a step above you tips it forward. The fix is the same in both cases: get the camera to the height of your eyes and shoot level.

Taken together with the requirement that your ears be visible and your head centred, what the specification is describing is a genuinely square-on portrait. Small rotations that would pass unremarked on a European application are measurable here.

The requirements say the photo must be printed on glossy photo paper, and specifically not on matte or plain paper. This is a rule about the physical object rather than the image, and it catches people who have done everything else right.

An inkjet printout on ordinary copier paper fails on sight — the surface is wrong, the colours are dull, and the ink sits on top of fibres rather than in a coated layer. Matte photo paper is better but still outside what is asked for. If you are printing at home you need glossy photo paper; if you are ordering prints, the default finish at a photo counter is glossy, so you generally get this for free.

The same section rules out any photo that is stained, scratched or creased, which is worth remembering if you are reusing prints that have been in a drawer or a wallet. A hairline crease across a 33mm-wide photo is proportionally large, and it will be visible.

The image itself has to be in colour and taken within the last six months, with a neutral expression, eyes open, lips closed, facing the camera, against a white or near-white background with no edge frame. Hats are permitted only for religious reasons and only where they do not obscure facial features.