You do not need a studio, a photographer or an appointment. New Zealand accepts a digital photo you take yourself, provided it meets the official specification. What follows is exactly what this booth does on your behalf, and what you need to do in the room.
Terms Privacy [email protected]Every rule quoted here comes from passports.govt.nz. Reviewed August 2026.
Light grey, cream or off-white. Stand about half a metre off the wall so you don't cast a shadow onto it — shadows behind the head are one of the most common rejections. Doors, picture frames and skirting boards behind you all count as objects.
Face a window with soft daylight. Avoid direct sun, overhead downlights and a bright window behind you. Half-lit faces and hard shadows under the nose and chin fail the check.
Camera at eye level, and at least 1.5 metres away. Prop the phone on a shelf or stack of books, or use a laptop on a table and sit back. An arm's-length selfie enlarges the nose and forehead — the official rules call this out specifically.
The booth runs in your browser on a phone or a laptop — nothing to install, no account. Allow camera access when asked. On a phone you can switch between the front and rear cameras; the rear camera is sharper if someone else can hold it for you.
Your video never leaves the device during framing — the face tracking runs locally in the browser.
An oval appears on screen and short instructions tell you what to change — come closer, sit up straight, look at the camera, stop smiling. Face tracking runs many times a second and checks, all at once:
Hold all of it for about a second and a half and a countdown fires the shutter. No reaching for a button, which is how most home attempts go crooked.
The capture is cropped to 3:4 portrait at 1080 × 1440 pixels, with your head at roughly 55% of the image height, your eye line about 45% down from the top, and your shoulders and upper chest in frame. That is the framing New Zealand asks for, and getting it right by hand in a photo editor is where most people come unstuck.
Your photo is assessed against the full New Zealand rule set and comes back with one of three verdicts, in plain language:
$9.99 gets you the 3:4 JPEG sized for the online application at passports.govt.nz, and a 6×4" sheet holding six 35 × 45 mm photos with cut lines, which you can print at any pharmacy or supermarket kiosk for a paper application. Retakes are free — come back and shoot again any time.
New Zealand explicitly forbids using AI or filters to change how you look, and a photo that has been altered that way can be rejected. Plenty of online passport photo tools quietly smooth skin, straighten heads or paste your face onto a template. We don't.
The cleanup step is background-only: the wall behind you becomes a flat light grey and background shadows are removed. Your face, hair, expression, glasses and clothing pass through untouched. If something about you is wrong, the honest answer is a retake — so that's what we tell you.
$9.99 for the digital photo and the print sheet. Free retakes until it passes. If Internal Affairs rejects a photo you bought here, email the rejection notice to [email protected] and your reshoot is free — as many times as it takes.