Thailand Needs Two Different Passport Photo Sizes and Nobody Mentions It
One photo size for the embassy, a different one for the airport, and a face-size rule that is checked by eye. Getting this wrong costs an application cycle.
I carried a lovely photo to the visa on arrival counter. It was recent, it was on white, I was not wearing glasses, it was a good photograph of me. It was also the wrong size, and the woman at the counter held it up next to the one she already had and said one word and handed it back.
That word was "sorry" and the next eleven days were the price of a rectangle.
Last verified 5 October 2026.
There are two sizes, and they are not interchangeable
Four by six centimetres is the photo for the visa on arrival, and it is measured on the counter at the back of the terminal, in the room with the queue, by a person who is not going to crop it for you.
Thirty-five by forty-five millimetres is the photo for an embassy or consulate application and for the eVisa upload, and it is a different rectangle, taller relative to its width than the other one, and it is the size almost every other country on earth also uses.
Which is why people get it wrong. They have a passport photo in their hand, it is the wrong rectangle, and the rejection is immediate and non-negotiable and does not depend on how good the photograph is.
So the rule is short and it is the only rule: if you are applying before you travel, 35x45mm. If you are buying a visa on arrival once you are already in the country, 4x6cm.
The rest of the specification
White background, solid and flat, with no shadow, no gradient and no pattern. Off-white and cream are the most common avoidable rejections because everybody's wall is slightly cream.
Your face should fill roughly seventy to eighty percent of the frame height, which is a much bigger head than most people expect from a passport photo, and it is the rule that trips up photographs that are technically fine on a passport and technically wrong here.
Neutral expression, mouth closed, looking straight at the camera, and no smile, which sounds strict and is exactly as strict as it sounds.
No glasses. This one catches people who have worn glasses their entire life and who genuinely did not know.
Colour, not black and white, and taken within the last six months. Consular posts and the eVisa portal are the authority for your particular application and some specify three months.
No head covering unless it is religious. And attire is checked: a sleeveless top, a tank top or bare shoulders is a rejection, and a cropped frame lifted from the data page of your passport is also rejected outright.
If you are doing the eVisa upload
JPEG, a minimum of around six hundred by nine hundred pixels, and generally a maximum file size of a couple of megabytes. sRGB, and at three hundred DPI if you are printing your own.
And the background has to be genuinely white because the portal's automated checks are harsher than a human at a counter, and a photograph that a person would accept a border booth will fail a file size or a colour profile test.
Why it is worth ten minutes of your life
Because the cost of a wrong photograph is not ten minutes. For an in-country application it is a trip back to the pharmacy. For an embassy application booked through an appointment system it is potentially weeks, because you are not going to walk back in.
And for a long-stay application where the police clearance took eleven weeks, the whole bundle is re-submitted or the appointment is rebooked, and a picture is the one document in the folder that was always going to be easy to get right.
The cheapest fix in this entire post: get the photo taken in the country where you are, by a shop that does passport photos every day, and say the words "Thai visa photo" rather than "passport photo". They will hear the difference and they will know which rectangle you mean, because they are asked several times a week.
