Turkey Passport Photo Size & Requirements

Some third-party photo tools list a light grey background for the Turkish passport photo. A Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs consulate page, fetched directly for this page, states white in capital letters with no ambiguity: "the background of your photo should be patternless and have a WHITE BACKGROUND." This tool defaults to white accordingly.

The 50×60mm size, white background, and no-accessories/neutral-expression rules are confirmed directly against a Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mfa.gov.tr) consulate page. That page doesn't itself publish a numeric head-height figure — the commonly cited 34mm target (used here as a 32-36mm range) comes from third-party consensus instead.

Almost every country with a rectangular passport photo uses 35 × 45mm. Turkey does not. The biometric passport photo is 50 × 60mm, which is both wider and taller, and noticeably closer to square at a 5:6 ratio rather than the 7:9 of the common size.

This matters more than it sounds. If you walk into a photo shop outside Turkey and ask for passport photos, the default template that loads is 35 × 45mm, and you will walk out with prints that are the wrong size for a Turkish application. The same thing happens with photo booths and with the automated kiosks in pharmacies, which almost never carry a 50 × 60mm preset. The only reliable approach abroad is to bring a file that is already cropped to 50 × 60mm and ask for it to be printed at exactly that size with no further cropping.

The cropper exports at 750 × 900 pixels, which is 15 pixels per millimetre or about 381 DPI at the full 5 × 6 cm size — above the 300 DPI that print counters generally want, with room to spare.

One consequence of the larger frame worth noticing: because the head height stays in the same 32 to 36mm band used by most biometric standards while the frame grows to 60mm tall, your head occupies a smaller proportion of a Turkish photo than it would of a 35 × 45mm one — a little over half the height rather than three quarters. A photo cropped for a German or British application and then simply rescaled to 50 × 60mm will have the head much too large. Reframe it rather than resizing it.

Most countries ban hats and sunglasses, allow or tolerate ordinary prescription glasses, and say nothing whatsoever about jewellery. The Turkish consular guidance is blunter than that: no accessories, and it names glasses, earrings and hats together in the same breath.

Taken literally that rules out the small stud earrings that would pass without comment almost anywhere else. It costs nothing to comply, so the sensible reading is the literal one — take them out before the photo rather than arguing the point at a consulate counter. Necklaces and anything around the throat are a separate matter from the rule as written, but a chain that catches the light is one more thing for a reviewer to look twice at, and the general principle behind every biometric photo standard is that nothing in the frame should compete with your face.

The same page sets out the pose rules in detail: lips closed, a neutral expression, eyes open and focused on the lens, the whole face visible with hair not falling across it, and the head neither tilted forward nor turned to either side. The photo also has to have been taken within the last six months, and it must be a clean print — a photo that has been creased, wrinkled or scuffed in a wallet is refused even if the image itself is perfect. These rules apply to children and babies on exactly the same terms, with no softer standard for an infant.

Worth being precise about which figures on this page come from where. The 50 × 60mm size, the white background, the no-accessories rule, the six-month window and the pose requirements all come straight from a Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs consulate page, read directly.

The head-height figure does not. That page states no numeric chin-to-crown measurement at all. The 34mm target widely quoted elsewhere traces back to a different ministry subpage, and is applied here as a 32 to 36mm band rather than a single exact millimetre, because a person cropping their own photo needs a tolerance they can actually hit. Treat the guide lines in the cropper as a well-calibrated starting point rather than a published legal requirement, and if your consulate hands you a printed specification with a different number on it, follow theirs.

For the background there was a genuine conflict in the sources, and it was resolved in favour of the document that could be read directly. One widely cited photo tool lists a very light grey for Turkey. The consulate page says white, and says it in capital letters. White is what this page uses.