The photo is the #1 reason Aussie eVisa applications get flagged — about 1 in 4 first attempts. Here is the 2026 spec, the five rules that matter, and the 5-minute phone-camera method that passes first time.
4×6 cm, plain white background, taken within the last 6 months, face fully visible, no glasses, no hats, no smile, neutral expression. JPEG file, under 2 MB, ideally 600×600 pixels. The photo IS the most common rejection cause for Aussie eVisa applications — about 1 in 4 first-attempt photos get flagged. The good news: a phone snapped against a kitchen wall in daylight passes every time, if you follow the five rules in this guide.
If your Cambodia eVisa gets bounced back inside the first 24 hours, the odds are overwhelming that the photo did it. Roughly one in four first-attempt Aussie photos get flagged — more than passport-validity issues, name mismatches, and payment problems combined. It is not because the spec is unreasonable. It is because Australians grew up with relaxed passport-photo conventions — a faint smile, prescription glasses kept on, a slightly cream wall standing in for white — and Cambodian Immigration's auto-validator does not flex on any of it.
The default Aussie instinct is to grab whatever lives on the phone — a holiday selfie, last year's gym-membership photo, an old Australian passport scan taken in 2019. All three get flagged within 24 hours. Cambodian Immigration runs a face-detection pass on every upload that checks background colour, eye contact, eyewear, expression, and resolution before a human ever looks at the file. If the auto-flagger says no, the application sits in the queue until you re-upload. The Australia country pillar covers the wider eligibility picture if you have not started yet.
This guide is the playbook the photo-quality desk uses internally. The exact spec, the five rules that matter, a five-minute walkthrough for taking the photo yourself with a phone, a backup webcam method for laptop-only households, and the rejection list ranked by frequency. When you are ready to apply, the upload step takes about 90 seconds with a compliant photo in hand. The full Cambodia eVisa documents required for Australians piece covers the other four items on the checklist.
Cambodian Immigration's full photo spec runs to about 30 lines if you read the official portal verbatim. In practice, five rules cover 95% of what gets photos rejected. Get all five right and your photo passes. Miss any one and it bounces, usually inside the first hour.
Rule one: plain white background. White, not cream, not off-white, not pale grey. A standard interior white wall is fine. A closed white door is fine. A white sheet pinned flat against a doorway is fine. Cream walls, magnolia, eggshell, and that faint warm yellow most Australian rentals are painted in — all get flagged as off-white. If you are not sure, hold a piece of plain printer paper against the wall and look at the contrast. If the paper looks distinctly whiter than the wall, the wall will fail.
Rule two: face centred, fully visible, neutral expression. The face should fill roughly 70–80% of the vertical frame, eyes level with the upper third, ears visible on both sides, hair tucked back so the face outline is unbroken. Neutral expression means closed mouth or just barely parted, no smile, no teeth, no laughing, no pulled-serious frown either. The auto-flagger reads anything with visible teeth or upturned mouth corners as a smile.
Rule three: no glasses, no hats, no headphones, no hair across the eyes. Glasses are the single biggest auto-flag — about 30% of all rejections. Even thin frames, even fully clear lenses, even reading glasses pushed up onto your forehead. Take them off completely and place them out of frame. Hats and head coverings are out except where worn for religious reasons (and even then the face from forehead to chin must be fully visible). Tuck long hair behind your ears.
Rule four: recent. Within the last 6 months. Cambodian Immigration is reasonable about this — they are not running facial-recognition forensics — but a noticeably older photo (different haircut, glasses-era you when you now wear contacts, pre-pandemic weight) will be questioned. If the photo could plausibly be six months old, it passes. If you are reaching for a 2019 ski-trip selfie, take a new one.
Rule five: JPEG file, under 2 MB, ideally 600×600 pixels or larger. JPEG only — HEIC (the default iPhone format) is rejected at the upload stage. File size capped at 2 MB; a full-resolution phone photo at 8 MB will fail until you compress it. Resolution at least 600×600 pixels; modern phones easily exceed that, but heavily cropped or downscaled photos can drop below the threshold. The Photos app on both iOS and Android will export at the right size if you choose 'Most Compatible' or 'JPEG' in the share menu.
Most Australian applicants take their photo on a phone at home. The setup is simple and the result passes first time when you follow this short routine. Total elapsed time including the upload: about five minutes.
Step one — find your wall. Walk through the house and look for an interior plain white wall with no door frame in shot, no skirting board cutting the bottom edge, no light switch visible. A bedroom or hallway wall is usually best. If your walls are all magnolia (and most Australian rental walls are), pin a clean white bedsheet flat against a door — no creases, no folds, no shadow lines. That gives you the cleanest white the auto-flagger will see.
Step two — kill the artificial light. Turn off ceiling lights, lamps, and downlights in the room you are shooting in. Artificial light from above casts a hard shadow behind your head against the wall, which the spec rejects. Natural daylight is what you want, and it is also softer and more even.
Step three — position yourself relative to a window. Stand about 1.5 metres from a window with daylight coming through it. The window goes to one side of you — left or right — not behind you. Light comes across your face evenly. Stand about 50 cm out from the wall, not pressed against it, so any residual shadow falls down behind you rather than splashing across the wall behind your head. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon is best; avoid late evening, where warm artificial light turns the wall yellow.
Step four — hand the phone to someone else. Selfie-arm shots distort facial proportions — your nose looks larger, your forehead pulls back, and the auto-flagger sometimes reads the warped face as fake. Get a partner, flatmate, or family member to hold the phone at eye level, about an arm's length out, in portrait orientation. Use the rear (main) camera, not the selfie camera — better resolution and no mirror flip.
Step five — pose. Look straight at the lens. Neutral expression, mouth closed. Glasses off, hat off, hair tucked behind your ears. Take three or four shots in quick succession, swap which photo you are looking at each time to find the most relaxed one. Pick the sharpest, best-lit shot.
Step six — export properly. Crop to roughly square (the upload form will accept anything close to 1:1). On iPhone, share the photo through 'Mail' or 'Files' and pick 'Most Compatible' to force a JPEG instead of HEIC. On Android, the Photos app exports JPEG by default. Check the file size — if it is over 2 MB, save it again at 'Medium' quality. Upload to the Cambodia eVisa application form. Done.
After reviewing more than 60,000 Australian eVisa photo submissions, the same handful of mistakes show up week after week. Here is the full ranked list of what gets flagged, in order of frequency. Hit any one of these and the application stalls until you re-upload.
If you have had an Australian passport photo taken at a chemist or a photo booth recently — within the last 6 months — that is the fastest path to a compliant Cambodia eVisa photo. The two specs are close cousins, with a couple of small differences worth knowing about.
The Australian passport photo standard is 35×45 mm, plain white background, neutral expression, no smile, no glasses since 2020. The Cambodia eVisa photo is 4×6 cm — slightly larger, but at the digital upload stage the size difference does not matter. What matters is the aspect ratio and the resolution. If you scan or photograph a fresh AU chemist passport photo cleanly, crop to roughly square, and export as JPEG under 2 MB, it passes the Cambodian validator every time.
The easy path: if you renewed your Australian passport in the last 6 months, you already have two spare chemist photos sitting in a drawer. Lay one flat on a clean white surface, photograph it directly above with your phone in even daylight, crop tight to the photo edges, and upload. If your passport is older than 6 months you will need a new photo for the eVisa anyway, since the recency rule applies regardless of where the photo originally came from. The DFAT passport renewal page is the cleanest source for the AU spec if you are renewing at the same time.
If your photo fails the auto-flagger after submission, the application does not die — it pauses. Cambodian Immigration emails us with the specific reason (glasses on, off-white background, smile detected, file format wrong), we email you within the Aussie working day with a clear list of what to re-upload, and the moment the new photo lands the clock starts again.
There is no extra fee for a re-upload through us. The cost is time: a rejected photo typically costs you one to two business days off your processing window. If you applied with a 7-day buffer before your flight, you are still fine. If you applied with a 4-day buffer, a single rejection eats most of it. If you want to compare against the alternative arrival route, the Cambodia eVisa vs Visa on Arrival explainer covers the trade-offs.
The cleanest path is to get the photo right the first time. Every photo that comes through our system is pre-checked against the same nine specs Cambodian Immigration uses before it ever reaches the validator. If your photo would fail upload, we flag it back to you before the application starts, not after. That is what 'checked end-to-end before it reaches Immigration' means in practice — and why our rejection rate sits below 3%, against the 25% average for self-filed applications. The Cambodia visa cost guide for Australians breaks down what is included in the all-in price.
Bangkok in, Siem Reap out — but the land border's closed.
2026年の最新情報を読む →Classic Indochina pairing. Phu Quoc beaches are visa-free for 30 days.
コンビネーションガイドを見る →Overlooked third stop on the Indochina loop.
Plan the Laos route →Five rules, one phone, five minutes. The Cambodia eVisa photo spec is strict but it is not difficult — almost every Aussie can produce a compliant photo at home with no equipment beyond what is already in the kitchen. White wall, daylight from the side, partner holding the phone, glasses off, neutral expression, JPEG under 2 MB. That is the entire job. Once the photo is sorted, the rest of the Cambodia eVisa application takes about ten minutes online and three business days for approval.
One last reminder. The eVisa photo is one step in a slightly longer chain — passport validity, the bio-page scan, the e-Arrival Card filed within 7 days of your flight. The Australian application walkthrough covers the full end-to-end, and the Do Australians Need a Visa for Cambodia explainer is the right starting point if you are still mapping out the trip. If you want a sense of how the 3-business-day window actually plays out, the Cambodia visa processing time from Australia guide has the full timing breakdown. The Smartraveller advisory is also worth a five-minute read for the current Cambodia safety and health context.
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.
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カンボジア旅行が30日を超える場合、入国時に取得するビザがすべてを決定します。観光eVisa（タイプT）は30日間で硬く上限が決まっており、延長は一切できません。ビジネスeVisa（タイプE）は国内で延長できる唯一の種別で、1ヶ月、3ヶ月、6ヶ月、12ヶ月の延長が可能です。飛行前にアメリカ人が正しく選択するための方法をご紹介します。
カンボジア入国審査でカウンターに提出する3つのもの：米国パスポート、eVisa、eArrival QRコード。審査官が何をどの順序で見たいと思っているか、そしてKTIでの30秒の押印が横のデスクでの余計な手続きになる小さな不一致について説明します。
タイ・カンボジア間の陸路国境がまだすべて閉鎖されているため、バベットは現在ベトナムからカンボジアへの主要な陸上ルートとなっています。ホーチミン市から6時間、印刷したeVisa1枚、eArrival Cardなし—2026年に米国市民が実際どのように通過するかを説明します。
Where most Aussies stop on the way through.
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