Vietnam Passport Photo Size & Requirements

xuatnhapcanh.gov.vn, the Vietnam Immigration Department's own site, didn't return readable spec content this session. The figures here come from cross-checked Vietnamese-language sources instead — a provincial police department's own published guidance, and a page citing an official Ministry of Foreign Affairs dispatch and the ICAO standard — which converge closely on 4×6cm, 70-80% face coverage, and a white background. Worth confirming directly against xuatnhapcanh.gov.vn before you submit.

One official-adjacent source says no eyeglasses at all in a Vietnamese passport photo; another, citing a Ministry of Foreign Affairs dispatch and the ICAO standard, says glasses are fine as long as there's no glare on the lenses. Until that's settled against a single authoritative source, the safer choice is to take your photo without glasses.

If you have lived in Vietnam you have already met this size. Ảnh 4×6 — a 4 by 6 centimetre photo — is the default ID photograph for a huge range of applications, not only the passport, and photo shops advertise it on a board outside by name. Ask for ảnh 4×6 anywhere and everyone knows what you mean.

That familiarity cuts both ways. Because the format is used for so many different documents, a shop will happily hand you 4 × 6 prints framed however they usually frame them, which is not necessarily how a passport application wants them framed. The size is right; the head position may not be. The crop guide above is set to the passport framing specifically.

The 2:3 shape is noticeably taller and narrower than the 35 × 45mm rectangle used across Europe, so there is no way to convert one into the other by rescaling. Malaysia's 35 × 50mmpassport photo is a third shape again — 5mm narrower and 10mm shorter than a 4 × 6 print — so a Vietnamese photo will not serve a Malaysian application either. The cropper exports at 720 × 1080 pixels, which is 18 pixels per millimetre and comfortably clear of the 300 DPI minimum the sources agree on.

Most photo specifications describe vertical placement as a margin above the head. The provincial police guidance consulted for this page does it differently: it describes the distance from your eyes to the top edge as roughly two thirds of the distance from your eyes to the bottom edge.

Worked through on a 60mm tall photo, that puts the eye line about 24mm down from the top and 36mm up from the bottom — a little above the middle. It is the same idea every biometric standard is reaching for, expressed from a different anchor point, and it is a genuinely useful way to check a crop by eye: if your eyes are sitting exactly halfway down the frame you are slightly low, and if they are a third of the way down you are too high.

Alongside that, the face should occupy 70 to 80 per cent of the frame, the view must be directly frontal with both ears visible, the head must be uncovered with no hat, headscarf or hair falling across the forehead or ears, and the expression natural and unsmiling with the eyes open. The background has to be plain white, bright, and evenly lit, with clear contrast against your face.

For an online application through the Ministry of Public Security’s Public Service Portal, the sources consulted agree on a JPEG under 4MB. That is a loose cap by modern standards and you are unlikely to run into it with a properly cropped photo — a 4 × 6 cm image at 600 DPI is typically under a megabyte. As elsewhere, the files that fail are the ones uploaded straight off a phone at full resolution without being cropped first.

Be aware that the portal is a different channel from an in-person submission, and the two do not necessarily want the same artefact. A printed 4 × 6 photo is a physical object that gets attached to a form; an online upload is a file. If your application asks for both, crop once and use the same export for each, rather than letting a shop re-frame the print.

Also worth knowing: the photo must have been taken within the last six months. For an application you have been putting off, that window is probably the thing to check first, because it is not negotiable and it is the one requirement a reprint cannot fix.