Schengen Area Visa Photo Maker — Free, Fast & Private
The Schengen Area Visa photo is 35×45 mm on light grey in print, and 413×531 px where the Schengen Area form wants an upload. service-public.gouv.fr F10619 puts the head at 70–80% of the height, chin to crown, and the eyes at 60–70% up from the bottom edge.
There is no single Schengen photo rule: the Visa Code defers to ICAO 9303 and every concrete figure comes from a national implementation. These are the French figures — 35×45 mm with the face 32–36 mm chin to crown (70–80% of the photo) — on a plain light background, because France forbids a white one outright. The Netherlands uses the same frame with a 26–30 mm head and does allow white; pick the route for the consulate handling your file, and check its own photo page.
There is no single Schengen photograph specification, and knowing that saves more trouble than any measurement on this page. The Visa Code, Regulation (EC) No 810/2009, is the law that governs short-stay visas across the area, and on photographs Article 13(4) says only that the technical requirements shall be in accordance with the international standards set out in ICAO document 9303 Part 1, sixth edition. It states no millimetres, no pixel count, no file size and no background colour. Every concrete number an applicant is actually shown comes from the national consulate or visa centre handling the file, which is why those numbers are not guaranteed to match across the member states. The 35 by 45 millimetre, 413 by 531 pixel form this page builds is the shape most ICAO adopters converge on, and the 20 to 500 kilobyte window recorded here is broad enough to survive most consulate limits, being neither the 100 kilobyte pinch the Indian and Korean passports impose nor the effectively open ceiling the UK allows. There is a further wrinkle in the law itself. Article 10(3)(c) points at a second possible reference, Regulation (EC) No 1683/95 on the uniform format for visas, with which of the two applies depending on whether the Visa Information System is running for the country concerned. So even at the level of which standard governs, the Visa Code offers a branch rather than a single answer.
Assuming that one European photograph serves for all of them is the error, and the two national routes offered above prove it: France sets the face at 70 to 80 per cent of the frame and forbids a white background outright, while the Dutch Fotomatrix asks for 26 to 30 millimetres of head on the identical 35 by 45 print, which is 58 to 67 per cent, and accepts white alongside grey and light blue. A photograph built to one is cropped wrongly for the other, and colour alone can put you on the wrong side of a consulate's checklist. So read the photograph page of the specific consulate or visa application centre taking your file, and treat this page as the ICAO-shaped starting point rather than the requirement. Recency is the other thing to confirm locally, because the six-month convention this specification is written around is a national implementation detail and not something the Visa Code itself sets.
Switch Schengen Area route in the tool and the export retargets; none of it leaves this browser tab by default. Figures come from service-public.gouv.fr F10619 — Normes pour les photos d'identité. If one has gone stale, contact@minipx.com.