South Korea Passport Photo Size & Requirements

A common misconception is that South Korea bans glasses in passport photos entirely. The official rule only prohibits tinted lenses and sunglasses — clear prescription glasses are fine, as long as there's no glare on the lenses or frames and your eyes stay clearly visible.

For an online passport reapplication through passport.go.kr, the recommended digital file is 413×531px (an acceptable range of 395-431 x 507-550px works too), at 300dpi, and under 500KB, JPG or JPEG only. Crop with the tool above first, then resize or compress to hit the file-size cap if needed.

The Korean passport portal defines the head measurement as 정수리 to 턱 — crown to chin — and then clarifies 정수리 in brackets as 머리카락을 제외한 머리 최상부, the topmost part of the head excluding the hair. The required range is 3.2 to 3.6 cm.

That bracketed clarification is doing real work, and it is the detail most English-language summaries drop. Many countries measure from the top of the hair as it sits on the day. Korea measures to the top of the skull. If you have voluminous, curly or piled-up hair, measuring to the hairline instead of the hair means your head reads as shorter than it looks, and a crop that lines the top of your hair up with the guide will put the actual measurement below the minimum.

In practice this means two things. Keep your hair flat and close to your head on the day, which removes the ambiguity entirely. And when you line up the crop above, think of the upper guide line as marking the top of your skull rather than the top of your hairstyle — if your hair rises well above it, that is acceptable and in fact expected, as long as the hair is not clipped by the edge of the frame.

For an online reapplication the portal specifies a JPG or JPEG file, 413 × 531 pixels recommended with an accepted range of 395–431 wide by 507–550 tall, 300 DPI recommended, and a maximum file size of 500KB. The pixel dimensions are easy. The 500KB ceiling is where people get stuck, usually because they are trying to upload a full-resolution camera file rather than a correctly sized one.

Some arithmetic that makes the limit less mysterious: an uncompressed 413 × 531 image is about 219,000 pixels. Saved as a JPEG at a sensible quality that is typically 60 to 150KB, so once the photo is actually at the right pixel dimensions you are nowhere near the cap. A photo straight off a modern phone, by contrast, is four thousand pixels across and routinely three to five megabytes — ten times the limit before you have done anything wrong. Resizing fixes it; compressing a too-large image to squeeze under the cap does not, because you end up with a 500KB file that is still the wrong dimensions and visibly soft once the portal rescales it.

The export here is sized for printing rather than for the upload channel, so if you are submitting online you will want to scale the downloaded file to 413 × 531 before uploading. Any image viewer will do it; the aspect ratio is identical, so nothing gets re-cropped in the process.

A consulate page states the two background rules plainly: 바탕색은 흰색이어야 합니다, the background must be white, and 테두리가 없어야 합니다, there must be no border. The second one is easy to overlook and is a real failure mode when you print at home or order prints online, because a lot of photo printing software adds a thin white or coloured margin by default to make the cut line visible. That margin counts as a border. Print borderless, or cut inside the line so no frame survives on the finished photo.

On the white itself, Korea is on the strict end. Several countries in Europe accept light grey or cream as alternatives; Korea does not offer that latitude. A cream-painted wall or a magnolia one photographs noticeably warm under indoor light, and a shadow gradient across a white wall reads as grey. Shooting in diffuse daylight, standing well clear of the wall, is what keeps it genuinely white rather than nearly white.

The other rules are the familiar biometric set: a neutral expression with the mouth closed and no visible teeth, both eyes open and looking straight down the lens, no hats or head coverings beyond religious daily wear that leaves the face visible, and a photo taken within the last six months with no digital editing, filters or AI retouching applied to it.