Saudi Arabia eVisa Photo Size & Requirements

This page covers the eVisa upload spec, published directly on the official visa.visitsaudi.com portal: a 200×200px square JPEG, 5-100KB, on a plain white background. If you're instead applying for or renewing a Saudi passport in person, a different physical print size is commonly cited (around 40×60mm), but there's no reachable official numeric spec for that process online — aggregator sites even disagree with each other on the required background colour. Confirm with your local passport office rather than relying on a print-size figure from this page.

Unlike most passport photo specs on this site, Saudi Arabia's eVisa portal publishes an exact pixel target rather than a printed size — 200×200px, with a file size capped between 5KB and 100KB. That's deliberately compact for fast upload on the visa portal. Crop with the tool above to get the framing right, then export at the exact pixel size if your upload gets rejected for being too large or too small.

The eVisa portal asks for a file between 5KB and 100KB. Almost every other photo upload in the world specifies only a ceiling, so the floor is easy to miss — and it is a real constraint once you understand where it comes from.

A 200 × 200 pixel image is 40,000 pixels. That is small. Save it as a JPEG with aggressive compression, which is exactly what happens if you run it through a generic “compress my image” tool trying to hit the 100KB limit, and you can easily land at 3 or 4KB — under the floor, and visibly mushy around the eyes and the hairline. The portal is using the minimum as a crude proxy for image quality, on the reasonable assumption that a file that small cannot contain a usable face.

The target to aim for is a clean JPEG saved at high quality straight from a correctly cropped 200 × 200 source, which typically lands somewhere between 15 and 60KB. That sits comfortably inside the window at both ends. If your file comes out above 100KB, the usual cause is PNG rather than JPEG — a 200 × 200 PNG of a photograph is often several hundred kilobytes, because PNG compresses flat graphics well and photographs badly.

The portal expresses the framing requirement two ways at once: the face should occupy 70 to 80 per cent of the image, and chin to crown should measure 1.4 to 1.6 inches. Those two statements are describing the same thing from different directions, and the inch figures tell you what physical size the square is being imagined at — 1.4 inches is 70 per cent of 2 inches, and 1.6 is 80 per cent. In other words the spec is thinking of a 2 × 2 inch photo, the same square format the United States uses, and the 200 × 200 pixel upload is that square digitised.

A practical consequence: if you already have a correctly cropped US passport photo, the framing is very close to what this portal wants, because both are built on the same square and the same 70 to 80 per cent face proportion. What you cannot do is take a 35 × 45mm photo cropped for a European application and squeeze it into a square — the aspect ratios are different, so either the sides get cut off or the face ends up distorted.

The background has to be plain white with no patterns and no shadows. The photo has to be no more than six months old. Only you can be in the frame, which rules out the cropped group photo and also the one where a hand or a shoulder survives at the edge. Your head must be straight to the camera with both eyes and the whole face visible, and the specification explicitly calls for the ears and cheeks to be clearly shown — so hair pulled forward over the sides of the face is a problem even when nothing is technically obscured.

Head coverings are permitted where worn for religious reasons, and in that case the requirement is the same one almost every authority applies: the face must stay visible from chin to forehead with no shadow falling across it. A hijab or a ghutra that leaves the full oval of the face clear and does not cast a shadow over the eyes meets the rule as written.

Because the upload is so small, it is worth checking the result at actual size before submitting rather than judging it zoomed in on a laptop screen. At 200 pixels square, a photo taken from too far away leaves a face that is barely a hundred pixels tall, and the reviewer sees exactly what you would see — not much.