How Recent Does a Passport Photo Have to Be?

Six months is the usual limit. It is also the easier of the two tests to satisfy, and the one that gets fewer photos rejected.

The stated limits

The UK digital limit is the strictest in practice and is easy to miss: photos uploaded to the online service must have been taken within the last month.

Check yours: passport photo size by country.

The test that actually matters

Every specification says some version of the photo must reflect your current appearance, and that overrides the date in both directions.

A photo taken five months ago that no longer looks like you is rejected. A photo taken last week is required if something has changed.

What counts as changed:

• Growing or removing a beard or moustache. The single most common cause.
• A substantial change in hairstyle, colour or length, particularly anything that alters the outline of the head.
• Significant weight change.
• New or removed permanent glasses, where they are permitted at all — noting that in the US they are not permitted.
• Facial surgery or injury.
• Ageing in children, which happens fast enough that a six-month-old photo of a toddler is often already unusable.

Ordinary ageing in an adult is not a change. A different haircut may be.

Why the rule is there

The photo is the reference against which a face is matched at a border, and the match runs against whoever presents themselves at the gate. A photo that no longer resembles you produces failed matches at automated barriers and manual checks every time you travel — which is a worse outcome than a rejected application.

Facial recognition tolerates ageing reasonably well and tolerates changes to the outline of the head poorly, which is why hair and facial hair feature so prominently in the list.

Reusing a photo

If you had four printed and used two, the remaining two are fine within the time limit and if your appearance has not changed.

Two cautions:

Some applications require a different photo from the one in your current passport, so that the two can be compared. Using a leftover print from the same sitting fails that check.

Check the physical condition. Prints stored in a wallet or a drawer pick up creases, scratches and colour shift, and any of those is a rejection. The image being valid does not make the print valid.

Digital files

A stored file has no physical wear, which makes reuse more practical — subject to the same date limit and appearance test.

Two things to keep:

• The original at full resolution. Cropping is destructive, and a file cropped for one country cannot be re-cropped for another with a different frame shape without losing quality.
• The date it was taken, which is in the file metadata and is worth not stripping.

That is the argument for treating one good photograph as an asset: crop it per country as needed rather than retaking it. The passport photo tool crops from a single source image to any of thirty specifications, in the browser, with nothing uploaded.

Before you use an old one

Look at it next to a mirror. If you hesitate, take a new one — it costs a few minutes, and the alternative is a rejection letter and a delay measured in weeks.