A US passport photo has to be 2×2 inches, and getting the picture right is only half of it. The other half is the printing: a 2x2 photo that comes out of the printer at 2.2 inches, or with the top of your head trimmed off, is as unusable as a blurry one. Every guide says the same thing about that part: “print at 100%, not Fit to page”.
We wanted to see what that advice does in practice. On 1 October 2026 we made a 2x2 photo and a 4×6 sheet of them with the US passport photo maker on this site, printed both the ways most people would, to PDF instead of paper, and measured the printed size straight out of each file.
What a 2x2 photo is in pixels
Inches only mean something once you know how many pixels go into each one. Photo printing works at 300 dots per inch, so:
| What you need | Pixels | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| One 2×2 inch photo at 300 DPI | 600 × 600 | The usual print size; also the minimum for the online renewal upload |
| One 2×2 inch photo at 600 DPI | 1200 × 1200 | Extra detail, same printed size |
| A 4×6 inch print holding the photos | 1800 × 1200 | Fits six 2x2 photos with cut lines |
Inside the square, the head matters more than the edges: from the top of the hair to the bottom of the chin it must measure between 1 and 1⅜ inches (25–35 mm). Most returned photos fail on that, not on the outer size.
What happened when we printed it
| How it was printed | The 2x2 photo came out |
|---|---|
| Opened the 600×600 file in Chrome, printed with the default settings (Letter paper) | 6.25 × 6.25 inches |
| Same, with Scale set to Custom: 32 | 2.00 × 2.00 inches |
| Opened the 4×6 sheet in Chrome, default settings | Sheet 8.07 inches wide, each photo about 2.7 inches; it changed with the window size |
| Windows: right-click the file → Print, default layout (A4 paper on our PC) | 11.7 inches wide, with the top and bottom cut off |
| Windows: right-click the 4×6 sheet → Print | Each photo about 3.9 inches, edges cut off |
None of these is a printer fault. They come from two quiet assumptions.
Browsers count 96 pixels per inch. Chrome shows an image at its pixel size, and for printing it treats 96 pixels as one inch. A 600-pixel photo becomes 600 ÷ 96 = 6.25 inches, and “100%” is exactly the setting that produced it. Scaling to 32% is 96 ÷ 300, which brings it back to 2 inches. A sheet wider than the browser window is first shrunk to fit the window, so its printed size depends on how wide the window happened to be. Do not print the 4×6 sheet from a browser tab.
Windows’ picture printer fills the page. Right-click → Print opens the Print Pictures window on a full-page layout with Fit picture to frame ticked. It has no “actual size” option at all. It enlarges the photo until the page is covered and trims whatever sticks out, which on a square passport photo means the top of the head and the chin. We saw the same fill-and-trim behaviour with ordinary photos in our test of turning photos into a PDF on Windows.
The file has to say how big it is
Programs that do offer “actual size”, such as Word or the Mac’s Preview, work out the size from a small resolution note inside the image file. A file that says “300 DPI” is placed at 2 inches; a file that says nothing is usually treated as 72 or 96 DPI and placed at 6 to 8 inches. When we checked, our own photo maker was writing the “says nothing” kind: the browser’s JPEG encoder leaves that field blank. It now writes the resolution you choose (300 or 600 DPI) into every photo and sheet. If you use another generator, check the file’s properties: on Windows, right-click → Properties → Details shows Horizontal resolution.
Three ways that come out at exactly 2 inches
- Order a 4×6 print. Make the 4×6 sheet, then order it at a pharmacy, a supermarket photo kiosk or an online photo service like any ordinary 4×6 photo. An 1800×1200 image on 4×6 inch paper is exactly 300 pixels per inch, so each square lands at 2 inches; ask for it not to be cropped or enlarged. This is usually the cheapest way and the paper is right.
- Print one photo from Chrome at 32%. Open the 600×600 photo in Chrome, press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac), open More settings, set Scale to Custom and type 32. Use 16 for a 1200×1200 photo. In our measurement that gave exactly 2.00 inches. Load photo paper and print; trim along the edge of the picture.
- Print the sheet from a program that honours DPI. With a file that carries its 300 DPI note, choose 4×6 paper, Actual size or 100%, and switch off borderless printing, which enlarges the image slightly to bleed over the edges.
Whichever you choose, check before you cut: lay a ruler on one photo. It must measure 2 inches, or 51 millimetres, on each side. If it is bigger, a scaling or borderless setting enlarged it; if the head looks cut off, the picture was fitted to the page.
The photo itself
Printing exactly is wasted if the photo is rejected. The State Department wants a photo taken in the last six months, in colour, against a plain white or off-white background, with no glasses, a neutral expression and both eyes open, on matte or glossy photo paper rather than ordinary printer paper. Ask someone else to take it from about two metres away: a selfie at arm’s length distorts the face. The US passport photo maker handles the crop and the head-height window; lighting and background are up to the photo you start with. For other countries’ sizes, the passport photo maker has 12 formats, and our guide on reusing one passport photo for several countries shows why a resized US photo often fails abroad.
Uploading instead of printing
If you are renewing online, you do not need a print: upload the 600×600 JPEG, which is the minimum size the renewal accepts. If a form sets a file size limit as well, the target-size compressor brings the photo under it without changing the pixel size.
How this was measured.
On 1 October 2026. The photo and the 4×6 sheet were made with this site’s US passport
photo maker at 300 DPI. Chrome prints were made with Chrome’s own PDF printer (the engine
behind Save as PDF) on US Letter with its default 0.4-inch margins. Windows prints went through the
right-click Print Pictures route to a temporary Microsoft Print to PDF printer on Windows 11.
The printed size was read from the drawing instructions inside each PDF. Measurement files:
tests/guide17spike.py in our test suite.