Drop your photo — or an iPhone HEIC — and get a 414×532 JPEG that prints at 35×45 mm at 300 dpi and fits under every IRCC upload cap. Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
The least-told fact about the Canada visitor visa (temporary resident visa) photo is in IRCC’s own application guide: “if you are required to provide biometric fingerprints and photo, you are not required to include paper photos with your application.” Most applicants today give biometrics — fingerprints and a photo captured live at a visa application centre — so the visa photo is taken at the appointment, not submitted as a file. Where a photo of your own still matters: applicants whose biometrics are already on file from a recent application, paper routes, and checklists that surface a photo item anyway. If yours does, everything IRCC actually publishes about that photo is below.
IRCC’s photograph-specifications page for the visitor visa gives physical print rules: frame at least 35 mm × 45 mm, head measuring 31–36 mm chin to crown (crown meaning the top of the head — or where the skull would be, if it’s under hair or a head covering), full front view showing the top of the shoulders, face in the middle, against a plain white or light-coloured background. Black-and-white and colour are both accepted. The photo must be taken within the last six months, expression neutral with the mouth closed; non-tinted prescription glasses are fine if the frame keeps clear of your eyes, sunglasses are not; a religious head covering is fine if your full facial features stay visible. For a digital file the page adds exactly one sentence: “If the photographs are digital, they must not be altered in any way” — so no retouching, background swaps or beautify filters. No pixel dimensions, no kilobyte cap and no dpi requirement appear anywhere on the page.
Unlike the PR photo, which has a published pixel window, the visitor-visa photo has none — so any pixel figure you see is a translation, including ours. A JPEG carries a small metadata field saying how many pixels print per inch; at the common 300 dpi, 414 × 532 pixels prints at 35.05 × 45.04 mm — at or above the 35×45 floor. (The industry-standard “413×531” conversion actually prints a hair under 35×45 at 300 dpi; this page’s preset rounds up instead.) The head rule scales the same way: 31–36 mm chin-to-crown is roughly 366–426 pixels of the 532-pixel height — about seven-tenths of the frame, which is why a phone selfie framed to the chest reads as “head too small”. The preset re-encodes to 414×532 and writes 300 dpi into the file so it reads as a 35×45 mm photograph; a studio scan at 300 dpi lands on the same numbers by construction.
The kilobyte rules live in a different first-party place: the IRCC Help Centre’s upload answers, which publish limits per online account. The IRCC secure account (GCKey sign-in) caps every file at 4 MB; the IRCC Portal, old and new versions, allows 5 MB; the citizenship, asylum and permanent-residence portals cap at 4 MB — and IRCC’s own reduce-your-file-size page warns the limit “can be as low as 2 MB” for some applications. Accepted formats also vary by account, but .jpg is on every list, which makes JPEG the format that satisfies all of them. iPhone HEIC appears on none — drop one here and PixFit decodes it in your browser and hands back a genuine JPEG. The preset targets 4,000,000 bytes, under every cap IRCC lists; at 414×532 pixels your file will come out far smaller anyway, at the best quality that fits.
IRCC’s help answer for oversized documents recommends scanning at a lower resolution, cropping away empty space, and — verbatim — “Reduce the JPG image quality if you have access to photo-editing software.” That guess-and-check loop is what PixFit automates: it binary-searches the encoder for the highest JPEG quality that still fits your target, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded — a photo tied to a passport application shouldn’t detour through a resizer’s server — and the re-encode strips EXIF metadata, including GPS, as a side effect. The one thing it deliberately does not do is “enhance”: brightness, background and face edits are exactly what the no-alterations sentence forbids.
If you’re applying on paper without biometrics, the rules are physical: two identical photos, printed on quality photographic paper, and — per the guide — your name and date of birth written on the back of both. Spec failures are a delay, not a refusal: IRCC’s page says flatly that if the photographs don’t meet the specifications, “you will have to provide new photographs before your application can be processed” — a round-trip worth avoiding when the application already takes weeks.
Because canada.ca publishes no pixel numbers for this photo, the internet invents them. Circulating claims we checked against the current pages: 420×540 pixels presented as the visitor-visa minimum (that figure is the citizenship photo page’s number), 715×1000–2000×2800 applied to visitor visas (that’s the PR photo window — a different application with its own page), a “1200×1600 official specification” (appears nowhere on canada.ca), and assorted KB caps and dpi rules with no source. Each neighbouring IRCC programme has its own genuinely different spec — borrowing numbers across them is how photos get returned.
The authority is IRCC itself: the visitor visa photograph specifications page, Guide 5256, and the Help Centre’s upload answers (file-size limits, accepted formats) — all current as read in August 2026; the portal’s own screens win if they disagree. Applying for something else Canadian? PR and citizenship photos have their own published windows. Heading to the US instead, the DS-160 photo is a square with published pixel rules. Or browse the full verified table.