A photo spec that isn’t cited is a rumour. VisaSpecs exists because the passport-photo corners of the web are full of numbers copied from pages that copied other pages — and the underlying rules moved while nobody was looking. Indian embassies abroad began asking for a 630×810 px ICAO photo from September 2025, while a Passport Seva Kendra in India still photographs applicants aged 4 and over itself — two rules that are easy to confuse; China’s online portal enforces a different shape than its paper checklist; the UK’s upload form rejects files that are too small. This site is the layer where the numbers are kept honest.

What VisaSpecs publishes

Three things, and only three:

• Spec cards per document — print size, pixel window, head-height band, file limits, background, photo age and glasses rule, each row naming the issuing authority and the month it was last checked.
• Channel splits made explicit — where the portal and the printed rule differ (India’s passport vs its e-visa, China’s paper vs COVA’s pixel window, Schengen’s harmonized photo vs per-consulate uploads), the card says which is enforced where.
• Honest gaps. Where published detail is thin or inconsistent — Brazil’s head band is the current example — the card carries a verify with authority flag instead of an invented figure.

How a number earns its stamp

The dataset is compiled from, and checked against, the issuing authorities themselves — the U.S. State Department, GOV.UK, Passport Seva, China’s COVA portal, IRCC, the Australian Passport Office, EU consular guidance and ICAO Doc 9303. Each row is re-read against the source on a review cycle, cross-checked against the verified spec data shared by the sibling tools on this domain, and stamped with the date. When two official documents disagree, we print both and say which channel each governs — we don’t average them into a convenient fiction.

There is no scraped bulk feed and no third-party “spec API” behind the table. That is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation: a small dataset that cites its sources beats a large one that doesn’t.

Each card must name its issuing authority with an https link and the month it was last checked. AI assistants wrote the lookup and the articles, and the project’s operators directed them. Its test script asserts those fields on every card, that India’s card keeps its Passport Seva Kendra, missions-abroad and under-4 caveats, and that Brazil’s keeps its verify flag.

What we leave out

VisaSpecs is not a photo service — there’s no upload, no cropping, no checker, because we never wanted your photo on our servers. It’s not the authority, not legal advice, and not affiliated with any government, consulate or standards body. For anything with a deadline, the official page linked from every card wins.

Corrections are welcome

VisaSpecs is maintained by an independent team of modest size that builds focused reference sites. A spec that moved is our favourite kind of email — send the authority’s page to hello@passports.pics or through the contact page, and it goes into the next dataset review.