Pakistan Passport Photo Size & Requirements

DGIP's own online passport renewal portal (onlinemrp.dgip.gov.pk) publishes a dedicated photo-requirements page, but it consistently blocks automated fetches. The figures on this page come from a search-engine-cached summary of that exact page, cross-checked against several independent third-party sources that all agree: 35×45mm, 32-36mm head height, 3-5mm above the crown, and a plain white background. If you have a moment, it's worth confirming directly against the live portal before you submit.

DGIP is explicit that the photo can't be cut down from a larger picture, or edited in software like Photoshop. This tool's crop and resize (nothing more — no retouching or filters) stays within that rule, but the source photo itself should still be a fresh, dedicated shot rather than a crop pulled from an old album photo.

The DGIP spec is written in millimetres, but the photo shop will ask for centimetres, the instructions printed on a form may use inches, and an online upload wants pixels. They are all the same rectangle. Here it is in each:

The cropper on this page exports at 630 × 810 pixels, which works out to 18 pixels per millimetre, or roughly 457 DPI. That is deliberately above the 300 DPI that most print counters treat as the floor, so the same file is usable whether you are printing it at 3.5 × 4.5 cm or submitting it digitally. There is also 3 to 5mm of clear space expected between the top of your head and the top edge of the photo, which is what the upper guide line in the cropper represents — if your hair is touching that line, you are cropped in too tight.

Two of the DGIP conditions sit awkwardly next to a tool that crops photos, and it would be dishonest not to address them head on. The portal states that your photo must not be cropped out of a larger picture, and must not be edited in photo-editing software.

What those rules are aimed at is clear enough once you have seen the kind of submission that prompts them. People send in a face cut out of a wedding group shot, a holiday photo with someone else’s shoulder still in frame, a screenshot pulled from a video call, or an image that has been through a phone’s beauty mode and come out with smoothed skin and a reshaped jaw. All of those fail for the same underlying reason: the result is not a photograph taken for the purpose, under controlled conditions, showing a true current likeness.

A purpose-taken headshot that is then framed to 35 × 45mm is a different thing. Every studio in Pakistan does exactly that, because no camera produces a 35 × 45mm file natively — a photographer shoots a portrait and then frames it to the required rectangle. The step that matters is not whether a crop happened but whether the original was a deliberate, front-facing photo against a plain white wall with even lighting and a neutral expression. If it was, you are doing what a studio would do. If it was not, no amount of careful framing will save it.

The second rule is the reason this tool does not retouch anything. It crops and resizes. It does not smooth skin, brighten eyes, whiten teeth, slim a face or generate a background. The optional background removal replaces the backdrop with a flat colour and leaves your face untouched, and even that is worth skipping for a DGIP submission if you can shoot against a real white wall instead — a genuine plain background is always the safer answer than a processed one.

For the online renewal the portal caps the upload at 5MB. In practice that is a generous limit and almost nobody hits it with a correctly cropped photo — a 35 × 45mm JPEG at 600 DPI is usually somewhere between 200KB and 900KB, so you have an order of magnitude in hand. The file that does blow past 5MB is the one straight off a recent phone camera at full resolution, twelve megapixels of uncropped scene, which is exactly the file you should not be uploading anyway.

The failures that come up far more often than file size are framing ones. Head too small in the frame, because the photo was taken from across the room and then enlarged. Head too large, with the crown clipped by the top edge. A shadow cast onto the wall behind, which happens almost automatically when the only light source is a window to one side and you are standing close to the wall. The fix for that last one is simply to stand a metre or so away from the wall rather than against it, so your shadow falls on the floor instead of into the frame.

Everyday prescription glasses are accepted, unlike in a number of other countries, but sunglasses, tinted lenses, hats and helmets are not. If your glasses throw a reflection from the window or the ceiling light, take them off — the rule permits them, it does not require them, and a glare-free photo without glasses will never be questioned.

35 × 45mm is the most widely used passport photo size in the world, so any photo counter will know it immediately — it is the same physical size the UK, Australia, Germany and most of the Schengen bloc use. If you are taking a file to a shop, ask for 3.5 × 4.5 cm prints on glossy photo paper and hand over the exported file rather than letting them re-crop it, since their template may frame the head differently from what DGIP wants.

You can also lay several copies out on a single sheet and have that printed as one ordinary photo. The print-sheet option under the download button arranges multiple copies on a 4 × 6 inch sheet or an A4 page with cutting margins, which costs the same as a single print at most counters. Cut along the inside of the guide lines with a steel ruler and a craft knife rather than scissors — a wobbly edge on a photo that is only 35mm wide is very visible.