Samsung’s One UI 7 and Pixel’s Android 15 camera apps can both produce passport-acceptable photos, but they fail at it for opposite reasons. Samsung over-processes — Scene Optimiser smooths skin, brightens eyes, and warms the white balance, all of which count as digital editing and get the photo rejected. Pixel under-processes — its default Night Sight trigger fires in dim rooms and ruins the colour accuracy needed for a biometric check.
Both problems are fixable in two settings each. This is the Android-specific version of our iPhone passport photo guide — same workflow, different gotchas.
What you need
Same physical setup as any other phone:
- A plain wall — white, off-white, or pale grey. No texture, no door frame in the shot.
- Daylight, ideally from a north-facing window or any window under overcast sky. Direct midday sun produces hard shadows.
- A way to put the phone at eye level: tripod, stack of books, or shelf. Don’t hold the phone yourself — arm’s-length selfie distance distorts the face and fails biometric checks.
- A Samsung Galaxy (S20 onward) or a Google Pixel (6 onward). Older phones work, but the sensors are noisier and the processing is harder to disable.
Samsung Galaxy: settings that matter
The default Samsung camera app is tuned to produce social-media photos — punchy, smoothed, warm. Every one of those tweaks is wrong for a passport photo. Here’s what to change.
1. Switch to Pro mode
Open Camera, swipe along the bottom mode strip until you hit Pro. This is the only mode where Samsung gives you manual control of focus, white balance, and ISO, and crucially, where Scene Optimiser is off by default.
If your Galaxy doesn’t have Pro mode (some A-series budget phones don’t), use the regular Photo mode and follow the disable steps in section 3 below.
2. Set the lens, focus, and white balance
In Pro mode:
- Lens: the 1x (main) camera. Avoid 0.5x (ultra-wide, distorts the face) and 3x or 10x telephoto (compresses features in a way that looks unnatural for biometric checks).
- Focus: tap the AF button, switch to MF (manual focus), drag the slider until the preview is sharp on your face. Manual focus prevents the camera from refocusing on the wall behind you mid-shot, which happens a lot with autofocus on plain backgrounds.
- White balance: tap WB. Set it to 5500K for daylight. Do not use Auto WB — Samsung’s auto white balance tends to warm faces for “flattering” tones, which produces a yellow cast that fails the colour-fidelity check in some countries’ compliance software.
- ISO: Auto is fine, as long as your room is well-lit.
- Exposure: start at 0. Bump to +0.3 if your face looks darker than the wall in the preview.
3. Turn off Scene Optimiser and Beauty
This is the single most important step on a Galaxy. In Photo mode (not Pro), Samsung’s AI silently smooths skin, lightens eye whites, and sharpens features. All three are digital editing.
To disable:
- Open Camera → tap the gear icon (Settings)
- Scene optimiser: off
- Shot suggestions: off
- Document scanning: off (it can detect “rectangle” objects and crop weirdly)
- Back out, then in the viewfinder, tap the wand/face icon — set Beauty filter to 0 for both face and body smoothing
Then go to Settings → Useful features → swipe down on the preview and disable any auto-apply filters you’ve saved.
A quick check: shoot a test photo of your hand. Look at the skin. If it looks waxy or weirdly smooth compared to the original, one of the above is still on. Common culprits are AI Photo and the Single Take mode’s defaults.
4. HDR: keep it on auto
Unlike Samsung’s beauty filters, the Galaxy’s HDR is well-tuned and doesn’t smooth skin — it just balances bright and dark regions of the frame. Leave it on Auto. If the wall behind you is bright and your face is shadowed, HDR helps; if everything is evenly lit, it’s a no-op.
5. Format and aspect ratio
- Format: JPEG, not HEIF, not RAW. JPEG is what every passport upload portal expects. HEIF works for the editor too, but if you’re uploading direct to a government site, stay with JPEG.
- Aspect ratio: 4:3 (full sensor). Don’t use 16:9 — it crops the top and bottom of the sensor and you lose pixels you’ll need for the final crop.
- Resolution: highest available. On an S24 that’s 50MP (Pro Mode caps at 12MP — switch to the dedicated “High Resolution” toggle if you want full sensor, but 12MP is more than enough).
Google Pixel: settings that matter
Pixel’s camera app is the opposite philosophy — minimal user-facing controls, heavy computational backend, and it usually does the right thing. For a passport photo there are only three settings to check.
1. Use the default Camera app, Camera mode
Open the Google Camera app. Make sure you’re on Camera mode (not Portrait, not Photo Sphere, not Night Sight). Default Camera mode on any Pixel from the 6 onward uses HDR+ Bracketing, which is the right processing pipeline for a passport photo — balanced exposure, sharp detail, no skin-smoothing.
2. Turn off Night Sight
Night Sight is a multi-frame low-light mode that produces a softer, slightly warmer image. It triggers automatically in dim rooms. For a passport photo you want the standard pipeline.
In the Camera app:
- Tap the down-arrow at the top of the viewfinder
- Night Sight: off (force-off — don’t leave it on Auto)
- Top Shot: off (saves a burst as a video clip, easier to manage one still)
- Motion: off
If the room is too dim to shoot without Night Sight, add a light or move to a window. Forcing Night Sight off in a dark room produces a noisier photo, not a better one.
3. Skip Magic Eraser and Photo Unblur
After you take the photo, Google Photos may suggest Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, or Magic Editor. Don’t tap any of them. They count as digital editing and will fail compliance.
The official guidance from the US State Department and UK HM Passport Office both explicitly prohibit AI-edited or AI-enhanced photos. The Pixel’s Photos app makes those edits one tap away, so the discipline is to not tap.
4. Lens choice
Pixel 6 and earlier have one main lens — use it. Pixel 7 Pro onward adds a 5x telephoto. The telephoto is actually fine for passport photos at the right distance (it’s a true optical lens, not digital zoom), but you’d need to stand 3–4 metres from the phone, which is impractical in most homes. Stick to the 1x main camera at ~1.5 metres.
The ultra-wide (0.5x) is off-limits on Pixel as on every phone — ultra-wide lenses distort faces.
Shooting workflow — same on both
Once the camera is set up, the actual shoot is identical to the iPhone process:
- Phone at eye level, portrait orientation, 1.2–1.5 metres (4–5 feet) from where you’ll stand.
- You at 50–100 cm in front of the wall, not pressed against it. That gap kills the shadow on the wall behind your head.
- Square shoulders, neutral expression, mouth closed, eyes on the camera lens (the dot, not the screen).
- 10-second self-timer, tap shutter, walk in.
- Take at least three timer-bursts — both Samsung and Pixel will capture a single frame on the timer by default, so just trigger the timer three times. Photos are free.
The Samsung AI processing trap, in detail
The single biggest cause of Android passport rejections is Samsung’s default Scene Optimiser. Here’s specifically what it does that fails:
- Skin smoothing. Subtle on a Galaxy S22 and earlier, more aggressive on S23 and S24. Compliance software detects skin texture; if the photo looks too smooth compared to typical pore-level noise, it’s flagged as edited.
- Eye brightening. Scene Optimiser lifts the whites of the eyes by 5–15% in well-lit scenes. Easy to spot when compared side by side.
- Background separation. On some Galaxy models with Single Take enabled, the camera produces a Portrait-style version of the photo with edge-detected background blur, even in regular Photo mode. Any edge artifacts around the hair are a rejection.
- Auto-warm white balance. Samsung tunes for “flattering” warmth, which colour-shifts the photo. Some EU member states’ compliance software checks the colour temperature of the background — a warm-shifted off-white wall reads as yellow, which fails the “white background” rule.
All four of those issues disappear in Pro mode with the settings above. If Pro mode isn’t available on your Galaxy, the manual disable list in section 3 covers the same ground.
Pixel-specific gotchas
Pixel’s defaults are mostly safe, but two recent additions need attention:
- Best Take (Pixel 8 and later). This is the feature that lets you swap a person’s face in a group photo to use a better-expression frame. On a single-subject passport photo it shouldn’t trigger, but if you accidentally tap “Best Take” in Photos, the edited result is no longer a single capture and will be rejected.
- Add Me (Pixel 9 onward). Composites two photos. Not relevant for a single passport shot, but make sure you’re not in Add Me mode when you shoot.
- HDR+ Enhanced toggle (in Settings). The default HDR+ is fine. HDR+ Enhanced takes longer and produces a slightly cleaner shot — also fine. Either works. Avoid the experimental “Computational Raw” for passport photos; it produces a DNG file that most upload portals don’t accept.
After the shoot
Same as iPhone:
- Don’t apply the Photos app’s “Enhance” suggestion. Both Samsung Gallery and Google Photos surface a one-tap enhance — it counts as editing.
- Don’t run a filter, sticker, beauty preset, or AI background swap. All disqualifying.
- Do crop and compliance-check. Drop the photo into the in-browser editor — it handles the country-specific crop, background, head height, and compliance against the 22 most common rejection reasons. Free preview with watermark; one-time unlock for a clean, submit-ready file.
If you have both an iPhone and an Android
The iPhone’s defaults are closer to passport-safe out of the box — no skin-smoothing, no auto-enhance baked into the capture pipeline. If you have access to both, the iPhone is the lower-friction option. The full walkthrough is in our iPhone in 60 seconds guide.
If you’re committed to Android, a properly configured Galaxy in Pro mode or a default Pixel will produce a file as good as anything from a photo booth or pharmacy counter, at a fraction of the cost.
Country-specific notes
The mechanics above apply to every country. For the spec — size, head height, background colour, expression rules — pick your country from the passport photo hub. The common ones for our Android-shooting readers:
- US passport — 2×2 inches, 51×51 mm, head 25–35 mm
- UK passport — 35×45 mm, head 29–34 mm
- Canadian passport — 50×70 mm, slightly larger frame, name and date on the back of the print
- Australian passport — 35×45 mm, similar to UK
If you’re renewing a US passport specifically, the 2026 renewal rules have changed — the photo now uploads digitally through DS-82 for routine renewals, so the digital file the Galaxy or Pixel produces goes straight in.
When you’re set, the editor is the fastest way to take the Samsung or Pixel file from sensor to submit-ready.