Spain Passport Photo Size & Requirements

Most of Europe, including Germany, France, and the general Schengen visa spec, uses a 35×45mm photo. Spain doesn't: its passport photo is 26×32mm, the exact same size as a Spanish DNI (national ID card) photo, confirmed directly against the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (exteriores.gob.es) and the official DNI portal (dnielectronico.es).

If you're applying for a Schengen visa rather than a Spanish national passport or DNI, you need the larger 35×45mm size instead — see theSchengen visa photo page. A photo cropped to one size will not be the right physical size for the other.

Spain's passport and its DNI (national ID card) are issued by the same authority, the Dirección General de la Policía, and share an identical photo spec: 26×32mm on a plain white background. One photo cropped to this page's spec works for either application.

The Spanish photo is the smallest on this site by some distance. At 26 by 32 millimetres it is roughly the size of a large postage stamp, and it has about half the surface area of the 35 × 45mm rectangle used across most of Europe.

Because the finished photo is so small, print quality matters more here than almost anywhere else. A flaw that would be invisible on a 50 × 70mm Canadian photo is proportionally twice as large on this one, and softness from an under-resolution source file shows up immediately. The export here is 307 × 378 pixels, exactly 300 DPI at 26 × 32mm, which is the figure the available sources converge on.

The trend across passport authorities over the last decade has been steadily towards banning glasses outright. The United Kingdom now effectively discourages them, Turkey prohibits them along with all other accessories, and Mexico removes them even for medical reasons. Spain has not followed: ordinary clear-lensed glasses are permitted, provided there is no glare on the lenses and the frames do not cover the eyes.

Dark or tinted sunglasses are of course out. And the two conditions attached to ordinary glasses are not trivial to meet with a phone camera — a ceiling light or a window reflects obligingly off any lens pointed near it, and heavy frames sit across the upper eyelid on a lot of faces.

If you depend on glasses and want to be recognisable wearing them, the trick is to light yourself from the front rather than from above, and to tilt the frames fractionally downwards so any reflection falls below your eyes. Check the result zoomed in before you commit. If a reflection persists, take them off: a photo without glasses is never rejected for not having them.

Both the passport and the DNI application require the photo to be on genuine photographic paper at high resolution. An inkjet printout on ordinary paper, however good the printer, is refused — and at 26 × 32mm the difference between a photographic print and a home printout is glaringly obvious, because every imperfection is magnified by the small size.

The economical approach is to lay several copies out on a single sheet and have that one sheet printed at a photo counter. Because the Spanish size is so small, a standard 10 × 15cm print holds a lot of them — twelve copies fit comfortably with cutting margins, which is far more than you will ever need for one application and costs the same as a single print. The print-sheet option under the download button above arranges the copies for you on either a 4 × 6 inch sheet or an A4 page.

Cut them with a steel ruler and a craft knife, not scissors. On a photo this small a wobbly edge takes up a visible fraction of the frame, and the application wants a clean rectangle.

One last note for anyone applying from outside Spain: if what you actually need is a Schengen visa rather than a Spanish passport or DNI, this is the wrong size. That is the 35 × 45mm specification, and it is covered on the Schengen visa photo page.