Before worrying about pixels, answer the first question: should there be a photo at all?

Region Decides

  • Include one: China, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, most of Continental Europe, much of the Middle East and Latin America — and any application where a form field explicitly asks for it.
  • Leave it off: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia. Many employers there use anti-bias screening and some applicant-tracking systems will discard or garble a photo-bearing resume. A LinkedIn profile carries your picture instead.
  • Always include when applying through a portal that has a dedicated photo upload — that field is validated, unlike the document layout.

When in doubt for a specific company, follow the job posting's own instructions; they override general convention.

If You Include One: The Specs

  • Dimensions: most Asian and European CVs use a standard ID-photo ratio — 1-inch (25 × 35 mm → 295 × 413 px) or 2-inch (35 × 49 mm → 413 × 579 px) at 300 DPI. In a document, a photo displayed around 2.5–3.5 cm tall is right; embed at ~400–600 px tall so it prints sharply.
  • File size: keep the embedded image modest (under ~200 KB) so the resume PDF stays emailable. Portals often cap the photo upload at 20–100 KB — compress to the stated target rather than guessing.
  • Format: JPG. Save the resume itself as PDF so the layout can't shift.

What Makes It Look Professional

  • Crop: head and the top of the shoulders. Eyes around the upper third; head filling 50–70% of the frame height. No full-body shots, no group-photo crops.
  • Background: plain and light — white, light grey, or the classic ID blue. Remove a cluttered room background rather than hoping nobody looks.
  • Attire and expression: dress one level above the role's daily norm; a neutral, slight smile. Straight-on angle, eyes to camera.
  • No filters, no sunglasses, no hats, and no photos where someone else was obviously cropped out.

Placement in the Layout

Top-right or top-left of the header, aligned with your name block, sized so it never pushes your contact details onto a second line. It should read as one element of a tidy header — not as the focal point of the page. Get the crop, background and weight right, and the photo does its only real job: looking unremarkable in a good way.