Passport photo size India — asli rules, official guideline se
The standard the passport office applies, the composition that passes, and how the passport, visa and identity-card photographs differ from one another.
Updated
Passport photograph advice online is a mixture of genuine rules, obsolete rules, and numbers invented by resizer websites. The reliable route is short: read what the passport authority publishes, and treat everything else as commentary.
The standard that applies
Indian passport photographs follow the internationally agreed civil aviation standard for machine-readable travel documents, and the ministry publishes its own guideline sheet explaining how that standard is applied to an application (Guidelines for ICAO-compliant photographs for passport applications). The application instruction booklet adds the practical requirements for the form itself, including the print size and where the photograph is pasted on a physical application (Passport application form instruction booklet).
Those two documents are the only authorities worth quoting. If a website's figures disagree with them, the website is wrong.
Composition, which is where applications actually fail
Background. Plain, light, and uniform. White or a very light grey is safest. No pattern, no furniture, no door frame, no shadow cast onto the wall behind the head. Stand at least half a metre away from the wall so your own shadow falls out of frame.
Head size and position. The face should occupy the majority of the frame height, centred horizontally, with a small margin above the hair and a little space below the chin. Eyes sit slightly above the vertical middle. A photograph cropped so tightly that the hair touches the top edge is rejected as often as one where the head is a small shape in a large frame.
Pose and expression. Face square to the camera, both ears roughly visible, eyes open and looking straight at the lens, mouth closed, neutral expression. No tilt, no three-quarter angle, no smile wide enough to change the shape of the face.
Headwear and glasses. No cap or hat. Head covering worn for religious reasons is permitted provided the full face from chin to forehead stays visible. Clear prescription glasses are acceptable if there is no reflection over the eyes and the frames do not obscure them; tinted or dark lenses are not.
Lighting. Even, from the front, with no hotspot on the forehead and no deep shadow under the nose or on one cheek. Daylight from a window facing you is better than a ceiling light above you and far better than a flash.
Print quality. Where a physical photograph is required, use a matt print with no white border, printed on photographic paper. Glossy prints and prints with a decorative border are refused.
Passport, visa and identity card are three different specifications
This is the distinction that causes the most wasted effort, because the photographs look similar and are not interchangeable.
The Indian electronic visa photograph is square, at least 350 pixels on each side and at most 1000, within a stated kilobyte range, with the head occupying a defined portion of the frame height and no borders or shadows (Indian e-Visa photo specification). A rectangular passport-style crop will not pass a square check.
The United States non-immigrant visa photograph is also square but much larger, with a minimum of 600 by 600 pixels and a separate set of composition rules (US digital image requirements).
Indian identity documents follow their own rules again. The permanent account number application is processed through two authorised facilitators, each publishing its own instruction page covering photograph size and where it is affixed on the form (PAN application instructions, Protean). Voter registration accepts a passport-style photograph uploaded with the online form (Form 6 guidelines, Election Commission of India).
And one document has no photograph upload at all: an Aadhaar photograph is captured live at an enrolment or update centre, so any site offering an "Aadhaar photo size" is selling something the authority does not accept (UIDAI enrolment and update).
Centimetres, pixels and the dots per inch between them
A 3.5 by 4.5 centimetre photograph is about 138 by 177 pixels at 100 dots per inch, 276 by 354 at 200, and 413 by 531 at 300. None of those numbers is more correct than the others; they answer different questions. When a form states a pixel figure, follow the pixel figure, because that is what its uploader measures. When it states only centimetres and you are printing, follow the centimetres and let the print shop worry about resolution.
The widely circulated 413 by 531 figure comes from the 300-dots-per-inch reading of the standard print size, which is why it appears on so many resizer sites without any portal behind it.
A workable process
Photograph yourself against a plain light wall in daylight, at a distance where the camera is at eye level and about a metre and a half away — closer than that distorts the nose and cheeks. Crop with the ratio locked to the shape you need, positioning the eyes slightly above the middle. Export at the pixel dimensions the form asks for. Only then bring the file to a byte target, because resizing after compressing undoes the compression work.
If a print is required, order a matt print at the stated size rather than cropping a larger print with scissors; hand-trimmed photographs are frequently the wrong proportion.
What no tool can fix
A photograph taken years ago, a photograph of a photograph, a group photograph with someone else's shoulder in it, a selfie with a visibly outstretched arm, and a photograph where a flash has washed out the face. All of these are content problems. They are cheaper to re-shoot in five minutes at a window than to argue about after a rejection.