Make Botswana Visa Photo

Botswana's e-visa portal states that the image should be in colour and 28mm by 36mm. That is smaller than the 35x45mm used across Europe and Asia, and smaller than the 30x40mm used in Qatar, Azerbaijan and Colombia.

Because it is smaller in both directions and a slightly different ratio, a photo made for anywhere else cannot simply be re-cropped without pushing the face out of the required proportion.

That proportion is stated precisely: the face, from the forehead edge to the bottom of the chin, should be 70 to 80% of the photo. On a 36mm frame that is roughly 25 to 29mm.

The photo must be less than or equal to 30 kB, in JPG format. For comparison, Uzbekistan allows 1 MB and New Zealand insists on at least 512 kB — more than seventeen times Botswana's entire ceiling.

The instinct is to shrink the image until the file fits. Resist it. Dropping the pixel dimensions leaves the face too small to verify and fails a different rule; lowering the JPEG quality on a correctly sized crop is the way through.

At 28x36mm and 300 dpi the image is about 331 x 425 pixels, which is small enough that moderate compression will usually land inside 30 kB.

Botswana lists what gets photos refused rather than leaving it implied: a photo that is either too dark or too light will not be acceptable, and red-eye photos are not allowed.

The composition should be a close-up of the head and partial shoulders, on a plain light background, with no other people or objects in the photo.

Head coverings, hair, head-dress or facial ornaments must not obscure the face — the wording covers hairstyle as well as clothing, so a fringe across the eyes counts.