Cambodia eVisa Photo Requirements: Exact Size and Specs Americans Need

How to take a compliant photo at home in 5 minutes

A phone camera and a plain white wall is the setup most American applicants use, and it produces a clean compliant photo every time when you follow a short routine. No booth, no print, no paid service. Five minutes at a sunny window does it.

Find a plain white wall — interior paint is ideal, but a closed white door or a white sheet pinned flat works too. Stand about a foot and a half from the wall, not pressed against it, so there are no shadows behind your head. Face a window where daylight comes in from the side, not directly behind you, so your face is lit evenly and the wall stays white. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon is best. Avoid evenings, when warm indoor light turns a white wall yellow.

Use the rear camera, not the selfie camera, and hold the phone in portrait orientation at eye level. Get someone else to press the shutter if you can — arm's-length selfies distort facial proportions and the validator catches that. Look straight at the lens with a relaxed, neutral expression. Take the glasses off, remove any hat, and tuck your hair behind your ears if it covers your face. Shoot five or six frames and pick the best one.

Then crop to a square in the Photos app so your head is centered with a little headroom, confirm the file is a JPEG under 2 MB, and you are done. Do not run it through a filter, beauty mode, or any editing that smooths skin — the validator looks for natural skin texture and rejects heavily processed photos. iPhone users: this is the moment to convert HEIC to JPEG if you did not change the camera setting first.

The auto-flags that cost Americans a day

The upload form runs an automatic check on your photo before submission, and the same handful of issues account for nearly every flag on American applications. None of them are hard to avoid once you know the list — they just need a second look before you hit upload.

• A smile. Americans are conditioned to smile for the camera, and a neutral expression feels unnatural — but any smile, even a slight one with no teeth, gets flagged. Relax your face completely.
• Glasses. Any frames at all, including thin wire rims and readers, are rejected. Take them off, even if you wear them every day.
• Off-white or colored backgrounds. A wall that looks white to your eye can read as gray or cream to the validator, especially in warm indoor light. Shoot in daylight against true white.
• Shadows behind the head. Standing too close to the wall, or lighting from one harsh side, throws a shadow that the check reads as a non-uniform background. Step forward and use soft side daylight.
• Low resolution. Anything under 600 pixels on the short side is flagged. This usually happens when a photo has been forwarded through a messaging app that compresses it — use the original file.
• Wrong file format. An iPhone HEIC file the form will not accept, or a screenshot saved as PNG. Export a real JPEG.
• Hats, head coverings, or hair across the face. The full face has to be visible from the top of the forehead to the chin.
• Filters and beauty mode. Heavily smoothed skin reads as a manipulated image and gets bounced.

If a photo does get flagged, it is not the end of your application — you simply re-upload a corrected version, with no extra charge, and the clock keeps running. Our guide to fixing a rejected Cambodia eVisa photo walks through each flag and the exact correction, and the photo rules sit inside the broader required documents checklist for US citizens if you want to see how the photo fits alongside your passport scan and email.

Get the photo right, then apply

The photo is the one field worth a careful second look before you submit, because it is the field most likely to send a file back. Spend the extra two minutes: true white wall, neutral face, glasses off, square JPEG under 2 MB, and confirm it is not a stray HEIC. Get those right and the photo clears on the first pass.

Once the photo is sorted, the rest of the eVisa is light. Tourist eVisa is $80 USD all-in, Business eVisa is $90 USD all-in, both approved in 3 business days and delivered as a printable PDF by email, both with free resubmission if Immigration flags a correction, and both backed by US-timezone support. There is no return flight, hotel booking, or bank statement to upload — the photo and your passport scan do most of the work.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when your photo is ready, follow the full US step-by-step application guide if you want to see every field, and bookmark our Cambodia visa hub for US citizens as the single reference for cost, documents, and timing.