Make South Africa Visa Photo

South Africa now has two ways in, and only one of them wants a photograph from you. Everything else on this page describes the traditional visa, applied for at a mission or a VFS centre, where you hand over a 35x45mm print.

The other route is the Electronic Travel Authorisation. Its application does not accept a prepared file at all — you photograph your passport with your camera, then the biometrics step asks you to take a live picture of yourself inside the application, and the outcome comes back instantly.

This is worth knowing before you spend anything. If you are on the ETA route, a photo you made in advance has nowhere to go.

The ETA is limited, though: it covers tourism and visitor purposes, no work, and only if you land at O.R. Tambo, Cape Town International or Lanseria. Arriving anywhere else, or travelling for another purpose, puts you back on the visa route and back to the specification below.

Visa authorities have a structural problem passport authorities do not: the applicant is, by definition, somewhere else, so there is no counter to summon them to and no way to control how the photo was made.

The United Kingdom solved it by paying for the counters — a worldwide network of visa application centres that capture fingerprints and a facial image on the spot.

South Africa's ETA solves the same problem the cheap way, by moving the camera into the applicant's own phone and capturing the image live inside the session. No network to build, and the photo still cannot be a file of unknown origin.

Both approaches end at the same place: a face captured under the state's conditions rather than supplied by the applicant. They just differ in who paid for the hardware.

Most countries ask for a neutral expression and leave it there. South African guidance goes further and states that your eyes must be visible and your teeth must not be — a closed-mouth, unsmiling expression.

This trips up applicants who assume a slight smile is fine because it passed elsewhere. If your lips part enough to show teeth, retake the photo.

Published guidance puts the head height between 31.5mm and 36mm from chin to crown, which is roughly 70-80% of the 45mm frame. The guide in this tool targets 32-36mm, which sits safely inside that range.

The top of your head must sit at least 3mm below the top edge of the photo. A crop that clips the hair or presses it against the edge will be rejected.

South Africa specifies 600 DPI, double the 300 DPI many other countries accept. At 35x45mm that works out to roughly 827x1063 pixels.

Start from the highest-resolution original you have. Upscaling a small phone-gallery thumbnail to hit the pixel count produces a soft image that looks wrong at print size.

Sunglasses are not allowed. Reading glasses are permitted only if they produce no reflections — and given how easily lenses catch a light source, removing them is the safer choice.

Headgear is prohibited except when worn for religious reasons, and even then your face must be clearly visible through it.