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US visa photo for the DS-160

The DS-160 wants a square JPEG between 600 and 1200 pixels a side and no heavier than 240 KB. A phone photo fails on all three counts before anyone looks at your face.

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Reads every image inside it. Nothing is uploaded.
Which file are you making?

The smallest square the form accepts. Always fits under 240 KB with room to spare.

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    Nothing here is uploaded. See how the page enforces it.

    The three numbers the upload checks

    CheckRequirement
    ShapeSquare: width equal to height
    PixelsAt least 600 × 600, at most 1200 × 1200
    Weight240 KB or less
    FormatJPEG, colour, sRGB

    A photograph straight off a modern phone is around 4000 × 3000 pixels, several megabytes, not square, and on an iPhone often a HEIC file in the Display P3 colour space. It fails every row of that table at once. The photo tool on the DS-160 reports the failure but does not say which row, so people crop, compress and try again at random.

    The tool above fixes all four in one pass. It crops the photograph to a square from the centre, scales it to the size you pick, draws it into an ordinary sRGB canvas and searches for the best JPEG quality that stays under 240 KB.

    Crop to your head first, then size it here

    The file checks are the easy half. The consular rules about the picture itself are stricter: your head, from chin to the top of the hair, should take up between 50% and 69% of the image height, eyes open, facing the camera, plain white or off-white background, no glasses, and taken within the last six months. The Department of State rejects photos that have been retouched or filtered.

    A centre crop of a whole-body photo will not meet the head-size rule. Crop the photograph in your phone's editor to roughly head and shoulders, in a square, before you bring it here. This page then handles the pixels, the weight and the format, which are the parts an editor on a phone does not let you control.

    Why a phone photo is the wrong colour, technically

    iPhones record photos in the Display P3 colour space, which is wider than the sRGB the Department of State asks for. The file looks fine on your screen, and the upload tool may still refuse it or render the skin tones oddly. Converting a HEIC to JPEG in some apps keeps the P3 profile attached, so the problem survives the conversion.

    Everything that passes through this page is decoded in your browser and redrawn on a standard sRGB canvas before it is encoded, so the JPEG that comes out is a plain sRGB file. The decoding and the encoding both happen on your device; a passport-style photograph is exactly the kind of file that should not go through a stranger's server to be resized.

    Questions

    What size should a DS-160 photo be?

    A square JPEG between 600 × 600 and 1200 × 1200 pixels, no larger than 240 KB, in colour. Both ends of the pixel range are on the buttons above.

    Is there a minimum file size for the DS-160 photo?

    The Department of State publishes a maximum of 240 KB and no minimum, so this page sets only the ceiling. A 600 × 600 photograph will never come out suspiciously small.

    Can I use a photo from my iPhone?

    Yes, if it meets the rules about the picture itself: recent, plain white background, no glasses, head filling half to two thirds of the frame. Choose the HEIC file as it is. This page decodes it and writes an sRGB JPEG, which avoids the P3 colour problem.

    Is this the same as the photo for a US passport?

    The digital requirements for an online passport renewal are close but not identical, and a printed passport photo is 2 × 2 inches. Check the form you are filling in. The pixel boxes above stay editable for exactly this reason.

    Does my photo leave my device?

    No. The crop, the resize and the size search all run in your browser. The photograph is never sent to us or to anyone else, and the page keeps working with the connection off.

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