Kyrgyzstan Passport Photo Requirements & Guidelines

A Kyrgyzstan passport photo looks unusual the moment you see the dimensions: 40 × 60 mm, noticeably taller than the 35 × 45 mm rectangle used across Europe. It's the Soviet-era CIS format, still standard across parts of Central Asia, and if you crop a photo to the wrong proportion it's an instant rejection.

There are two more Kyrgyz quirks worth knowing before you shoot — how the head is *positioned*, and how the photo has to be *printed*. This guide covers all three.

The specification, at a glance

The tall frame changes how you crop

The 40 × 60 mm frame is taller and narrower than most passport photos, and that matters when you're cropping a phone photo. If you've made a 35 × 45 or a square 50 × 50 photo before, your instinct for where the head sits will be wrong here — the extra height means more space above and below the face than you'd expect.

Getting a phone photo to the right 40 × 60 proportion, with the head correctly placed inside it, is exactly the sort of thing worth handing to a tool rather than eyeballing. You can create your Kyrgyzstan passport photo and let the crop and head placement be worked out from the original image.

The head is placed from the eyes, not the crown

Here's the part that surprises people. Many countries define head size top-down — chin to crown. The CIS convention Kyrgyzstan follows leans on the eye line: the eyes sit at a set height within the tall frame, with roughly 5 mm of clearance above the top of the head. Worked through, the head ends up around 32–36 mm chin to crown — but because the anchor point is the eyes, heads shot to a top-down rule often come out sized wrong.

The practical takeaway: don't just make the head "big enough." The eyes need to land at the right level, and in a 60 mm-tall frame that's a different position than in a 45 mm one.

Glasses off, and the print must be glossy

Two more rules quietly cause rejections:

No glasses

Kyrgyzstan does not permit glasses, and tinted lenses are specifically banned. Take them off — there's no glare-free exception to fall back on.

Glossy paper, clean edges

The printed photo is expected on glossy photo paper, in colour, sharp and with clean, uncut corners. A matte inkjet print or a photo trimmed down from a larger sheet can be refused on finish alone. Applicants are often asked to bring the printed photo plus a digital copy on a USB stick or by email, so keep the high-resolution original.

Print and digital

The printed photo

A 40 × 60 mm glossy colour print, head positioned by the eye line, plain white background, taken within the last six months. This is the primary deliverable — Kyrgyzstan's passport is applied for in person.

The digital copy

There's no public self-service upload portal for the passport, so treat "digital" as the high-resolution file you hand over alongside the print (commonly 300 DPI, JPEG). Note that the 35 × 45 mm spec you'll see circulating online is the separate Kyrgyz e-visa photo — not the passport. Don't mix them up.

How Kyrgyzstan compares

Kyrgyzstan's 40 × 60 mm frame is shared with neighbours like Kazakhstan's larger documents and several other CIS states, but the details split apart quickly — Kazakhstan uses the compact 35 × 45 for its passport and allows clear glasses, while Kyrgyzstan runs the tall format and bans them. The format looks regional; the rules are national. Our passport photo tool for 150+ countries applies each country's own size and rules to the same source image.

The short version

Kyrgyzstan wants the tall 40 × 60 mm CIS photo on plain white, glasses off, printed glossy with clean edges — and the head placed by the eye line, not just cropped "big enough." Nail the proportion and the eye position, and you've handled what Kyrgyzstan actually rejects photos for.