Australia Visa Photo Requirements 2026

Official Australia Visa Photo Requirements

Australian visa applications are lodged through ImmiAccount, and the photo standard the Department of Home Affairs publishes for its applications is the one below. It differs from most visa specs in one important way, covered in the next section.

• Online (ImmiAccount): JPEG between 70 KB and 3.5 MB. Preferred resolution 1200 x 1600 pixels.
• On paper: 35-40mm wide and 45-50mm high.
• Head size: the face from chin to crown must be 32-36mm - roughly 71-80% of a 45mm photo.
• Background: neutral or light grey, contrasting with your face. No patterns, objects or shadows.
• Age: taken within the last 6 months.
• Head coverings worn for religious reasons are permitted, provided the whole face from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead is visible.
• A scan of a photo, or a photograph of a photo, is not accepted.

Home Affairs Requires the Photo to Be Unedited

This is the requirement that catches people, and it is stated plainly: the photo must "be unedited (do not remove background, moles, wrinkles, scars or red eyes)".

Background removal is named specifically. That rules out the entire category of tool that takes a selfie and generates a compliant-looking photo from it - the output is, by definition, edited.

So for Australian visas VisaPhotoCheck measures and reports rather than corrects. You get every measurement against the official range and a plain list of what to fix, and then you reshoot. That is the compliant path, and knowing before you lodge is the point.

Visa vs ETA - They Are Not the Same Application

An Australian ETA or eVisitor is a short-stay travel authority available only to passport holders of certain countries. Indian nationals, among many others, are not eligible for either and must lodge a visa - subclass 600 for a visit, 500 for study.

If you are filing a subclass 500, 189, 190, 491, 820 or 600, this page is the one that applies to you, not the ETA page.

Where This Specification Comes From

Being straight about provenance, because it affects how much weight to put on this page. The requirements above are published by the Department of Home Affairs for applications made to it, and the ImmiAccount upload path and image standard are shared across its application types.

Home Affairs does not publish a single visa-specific photo specification page - individual subclass checklists ask for "a recent passport-sized photograph" without restating the detail. So this profile is built on the department's own published standard rather than on a subclass-specific document, and we mark it as pending official review rather than claim more than we know.