33 × 48 mm — 33 millimeters wide, 48 millimeters tall — is the printed photo size for a China visa. You will see it written both ways: official charts put the height first, 48 × 33 mm, while most people type the width first, 33x48. Same photo either way. In inches it is roughly 1.30 × 1.89 — a narrow portrait, not the square 2 × 2 inch US photo and not the 35 × 45 mm UK/Schengen frame it gets mistaken for. And the print size is only half the spec: the COVA online application takes a separate digital upload with its own pixel and kilobyte window, which is where most photos actually get stuck.
Make my China visa photo — see it free33x48 or 48x33
The two numbers name one photo. The frame is 33 mm wide and 48 mm high, and the only thing that changes between "33x48" and "48x33" is which side gets said first. Size charts — including ours — often write it height first, as 48 × 33 mm (h × w), because that is how the spec sheet presents it. Search boxes and photo-lab order forms usually go width first. If you are double-checking which side is which: the photo is taller than it is wide, so 48 is the height, always.
Inside that frame, the printed spec also fixes the head: 28–33 mm of head height in the 48 mm frame. That band, not the frame itself, is what photos fail on — any print shop can cut a 33 × 48 rectangle, but no scissors move the head inside it.
The conversions
In inches: about 1.30 × 1.89 in — divide each side by 25.4 (33 ÷ 25.4 = 1.299, 48 ÷ 25.4 = 1.890). There is no tidy fraction, and it is not 2 × 2 inches, which is a different, square photo. In pixels there is no single answer, because millimeters only become pixels through a print resolution:
| 150 DPI | 195 × 283 px |
|---|---|
| 300 DPI | 390 × 567 px |
| 600 DPI | 780 × 1134 px |
Each row is the same arithmetic: millimeters divided by 25.4, times the DPI, rounded — at 300 DPI, 33 ÷ 25.4 × 300 ≈ 390 and 48 ÷ 25.4 × 300 ≈ 567. The aspect ratio is 11:16 in every case. But before you convert anything, read the next section: the COVA upload publishes its own pixel figures, and they are not on this table.
Print vs digital
The 33 × 48 mm figure governs paper. The COVA portal upload has its own published window, read here straight from the spec we process against:
| Photo size | 354×472 to 420×560 pixels |
|---|---|
| File size | 40–120 KB |
| Format | JPEG |
| Head height | 58.4–68.7% of the photo's height |
| Head tilt | 20° or less |
| Background | Plain white |
Two things the numbers alone tell you. First, the upload window is not a DPI conversion of the print size — no row of the DPI table above lands inside it. Second, the shapes differ: 33:48 reduces to 11:16 (about 0.69), while 354:472 and 420:560 both reduce to exactly 3:4 (0.75). So scaling a scan of the print cannot hit the portal window — the photo has to be recropped to the digital frame, not resized. The head band carries over in spirit, though: 28–33 mm of a 48 mm print is the same roughly 58–69% band the digital spec states in percent.
If the portal already turned your file away, the fix is usually the file, not the face — walk through COVA photo upload failed. Full rulebook for the document: China visa photo requirements.
Close, but different
Two neighbors get mixed up with this one constantly. For the record:
Every country's frame, digital window, and recency rule in one place: the passport photo size chart.
Getting one that passes
The frame is the easy part — any editor can crop to 11:16 or 3:4. Rejections come from everything attached to the frame: the head band, the tilt limit, the pure-white background, and the upload's narrow kilobyte window, which ordinary photo files miss in both directions.
That is the work the maker buys you out of. You upload one plain photo and processing runs server-side: the background is replaced with pure white, the crop is solved so your head lands inside the 58.4–68.7% of the photo's height band, and the file comes back as 354×472 to 420×560 JPEG · 40–120 KB · pure white background — the digital file the COVA upload takes. This flow is digital-only: the portal takes a file, not paper, so there is no print sheet.
Already have a photo? Run it through the free China visa photo check first — it measures your file exactly as-is against the spec, nothing altered, nothing to pay. And if a check there already came back red, start at China visa photo check failed.
Questions
Both describe the same photo. It is 33 mm wide and 48 mm tall — a portrait rectangle. Official charts often write it height first, as 48 × 33 mm (h × w), while most people type the width first, 33x48. Whichever order you saw, there is one frame: taller than it is wide, 33 by 48.
No. 35 × 45 mm is the UK/Schengen frame; the China visa print size is 33 × 48 mm — narrower and taller, with its own head-height band of 28–33 mm. The two are close enough to be a trap: a 35 × 45 photo needs recropping to the China spec, not trimming 2 mm off the sides.
The portal upload window is 354 × 472 to 420 × 560 pixels, as a JPEG between 40 and 120 KB, on a plain white background. Those numbers are not a DPI conversion of the 33 × 48 mm print — the upload is its own spec, and the file has to land inside the pixel and kilobyte window to go through.
About 1.30 × 1.89 inches — 33 and 48 divided by 25.4. There is no clean fraction, and it is not the 2 × 2 inch (51 × 51 mm) square the US uses. If a form asks for 2 × 2, that is a different photo, not a conversion of this one.
The official spec publishes both: a printed photo of 48 × 33 mm (height by width) with the head 28–33 mm, and a separate COVA portal upload of 354 × 472 to 420 × 560 px at 40–120 KB. Our China flow produces the digital file, because that is what the COVA upload takes — it is digital-only, with no print sheet.
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