Cambodia eVisa Photo on Your iPhone at Home: 2026 Aussie Self-Take Guide

Step 1: pick the wall, pick the window

The single highest-leverage decision in a DIY Cambodia eVisa photo is which wall you stand against and which window the light comes from. Get these two right and the rest is hard to mess up. Get either wrong and even a perfect Photo-mode shot will get bounced.

Finding a true-white wall in an Aussie home

Walk through your house and look at each blank section of wall in the same room as a window. Modern Aussie homes, especially anything built or repainted in the last decade, tend to be Antique White, Hog Bristle, Vivid White, or one of the Dulux off-white variants. Antique White and Hog Bristle photograph as cream and will fail the Cambodian background check. Vivid White is the one you want. If your hallway is darker than the lounge, that is fine — bring a single bedsheet from the linen cupboard, drape it over a wardrobe door, and use that as the background. A flat white bedsheet pinned taut against a wardrobe gives a cleaner background than most actual house walls in Aussie homes.

North-facing window or late-afternoon south-east

In Australia, north-facing windows get the steadiest, softest daylight through the middle of the day. South-facing windows give cooler, flatter light that also works. East-facing windows are great between 9 am and 11 am. West-facing windows are great between 3 pm and 5 pm, especially in summer when daylight saving stretches the usable window into the early evening. Avoid direct hard sunlight — if you can see a sharp shadow on the ground from the window, hang a thin white sheet or net curtain across it to diffuse the light. Soft is better than bright.

Position yourself 50 cm in front of the wall — not touching it. The gap matters because it lets any shadow from your head fall down behind your feet, not onto the wall behind your head. Cambodia is strict on background shadows. Face the window so the daylight hits you square-on from the side. Do not stand with the window directly behind the phone — the light source needs to be at roughly 90 degrees to the camera-to-subject line.

Step 2: distance, default Photo mode, and the Portrait-mode trap

Get someone else to hold the phone. A selfie at arm's length cannot give you the right distance, the right angle, or the right framing. A partner, housemate, parent, or older child holding the phone at eye level 1.5 metres away is the brief.

Why 1.5 metres matters

Phones under 1 metre away apply lens distortion to your face — your nose looks larger and your ears smaller than reality. The Cambodian validator does not formally fail this, but it makes the face hard to match to your passport bio-page photo and pushes you closer to a manual review. At 1.5 metres with the phone in 1x mode (not zoomed in, not the wide-angle 0.5x lens), your face is rendered at roughly true proportions. Most Aussie lounge rooms have at least 2 metres of clear floor between a wall and the opposite sofa — find that space first.

The Portrait-mode trap

This is the single most common reason an Aussie self-take photo gets bounced. iPhone Portrait mode and Samsung Live Focus blur the background behind the subject, which looks great on Instagram but breaks the Cambodian photo validator. The validator runs an edge-detection check on the head-to-background boundary, and Portrait mode introduces a soft halo of pixels that fails that check. Use the default Photo mode. On iPhone, that is the leftmost option in the bottom carousel — labelled simply 'PHOTO'. On Samsung, it is 'PHOTO' in the standard camera app. On Google Pixel, it is also 'CAMERA' in standard mode.

Frame the shot so the top of your head sits a few centimetres below the top edge of the screen and your collarbone is at roughly the bottom edge. The face wants to fill 70 to 80 percent of the vertical frame. Shoot four or five frames in quick succession. Slight changes between frames — a hair out of place, a flicker of an eyelid — mean you have options when you pick the keeper. Look directly at the camera lens, not at the screen. Mouth closed, expression neutral. Ears visible (tuck hair behind them if needed). Jawline visible (no high collars, scarves, or roll-necks).

Step 3: export as JPEG, crop to spec, check size

You have shot four or five frames. Now pick the sharpest, get it out of HEIC and into JPEG if needed, crop it to the Cambodian spec, and check the file size. Three to five minutes start to finish on either iOS or Android.

Picking the keeper

Open the Photos app and zoom in on each frame at 100 percent. Check the eyes are sharp (not slightly blurred from motion), expression is neutral, mouth is closed, no shadow behind the head. Pick one. Delete the others or just leave them in the camera roll.

Cropping on iPhone (iOS Photos)

Open the chosen photo, tap Edit in the top-right, tap the crop icon (the bottom-right icon that looks like a small square with arrows). Tap the aspect-ratio icon at the top, choose Square (1:1). Drag the corners so your face fills 70 to 80 percent of the vertical frame, with about 10 percent of headroom above the hair. Tap Done. The crop saves automatically and the file stays as JPEG (assuming you switched off HEIC in Settings).

Cropping on Android (Google Photos)

Open the chosen photo in Google Photos, tap Edit at the bottom, tap Crop. Tap the aspect-ratio icon, choose Square. Drag the corners until the face fills 70 to 80 percent of the vertical frame. Tap Save as copy in the bottom-right. The crop saves as a new JPEG in your gallery.

Checking the file size

Cambodia wants the file under 2 MB. A standard iPhone or Android photo at 12 MP comes in around 3 to 5 MB before crop, and around 1 to 1.5 MB after a square crop. Check the file size in Files (iOS) or Files by Google (Android) under your Photos folder. If the file is over 2 MB, run it through the free TinyJPG website or a quick screenshot of the cropped photo will compress it well below 2 MB automatically.

Once the photo is sorted, the rest of the eVisa documents take about ten more minutes — the bio-page scan, the AU address, the flight outline. The Cambodia eVisa documents required for Australians checklist covers all five items end-to-end. Tourist eVisa is $80 USD (~$122 AUD) all-in, approved in 3 business days, delivered as a printable PDF by email.

The five most common Aussie self-take mistakes

From roughly 90 Aussie iPhone and Android photo submissions reviewed each week, these are the five mistakes that come up most often in order of frequency.

• Portrait mode left on — soft halo around the head fails the edge-detection check. Switch to default Photo mode and re-shoot.
• Wall is Antique White, Hog Bristle, or another off-white that photographs as cream — drape a flat white bedsheet over a wardrobe and re-shoot against that.
• Overhead ceiling light still on — creates a hard shadow under the chin and across the wall. Turn off all artificial lighting and shoot in window daylight only.
• Glasses still on — even thin frames cause glare on the lenses that the Cambodian validator flags. Take them off, even if you cannot see the camera clearly. The shoot is over in 30 seconds.
• File is HEIC, not JPEG — Cambodia rejects HEIC at upload. Switch iPhone camera Format to Most Compatible in Settings before the shoot, or screenshot the photo as a quick workaround.

If your photo does get bounced at upload, the fix is almost always one of the five above. Open the rejection notice, identify which rule was broken, re-shoot against the corrected setup. The resubmission guide for Australians walks through the upload-and-replace flow. Free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction is standard — you do not pay again to upload a fixed photo.

Putting it all together

About ten minutes start to finish at home — pick the wall, pick the window, get a partner to hold the phone in default Photo mode at 1.5 metres, shoot four frames, crop the keeper to square, export as JPEG under 2 MB, upload to the Cambodia eVisa application. About 85 percent of Aussies pass on the first attempt with this routine. If you would rather not take the risk, the chemist photo path covers when paying twenty dollars makes sense and the application form itself is roughly ten minutes online.

Next steps and related reading for Australians: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark our Cambodia visa hub for Australian citizens as the single canonical reference, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa documents for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.