Nearly every authority asks for a photograph taken within the last six months. A few say twelve. The United States asks for six and adds a sentence that explains the whole rule: the photo must reflect your current appearance.
How the rule is enforced
There is no date stamp on a printed photograph, and metadata in an uploaded file is not treated as evidence - it is trivially editable, and most upload portals strip it anyway. So in practice the rule is enforced two ways.
By comparison. If you are renewing, the office has your previous photo. A submitted photograph that looks identical to one from eight years ago is the classic trigger.
By appearance. Visible changes are what matter: substantially different hair, significant weight change, facial hair grown or removed, an obvious difference in age. A photo that is technically fourteen months old but looks like you today rarely causes trouble. A six-month-old photo taken before you shaved a full beard might.
Changes that mean you should retake
- Facial hair. Growing or removing a beard is the single largest change most adult faces undergo, and it alters the jaw line the comparison depends on.
- A significant change in weight. Face shape is one of the things being measured.
- Major hair change, particularly anything that changes the outline of the head or covers the face.
- Facial surgery or a visible injury that has changed the features.
- Children. A two-year-old changes beyond recognition in six months, which is why child passports are issued for short validity periods in most countries.
What does not require a retake
A haircut that leaves the face unchanged, a new pair of glasses you will not be wearing in the photo anyway, a tan, or ordinary day-to-day variation. Tattoos and piercings are generally acceptable as part of your appearance, though some authorities ask that facial piercings not obscure features.
Can you reuse a photo from an old application?
Technically the file will still open, and if it was correct then it may still be correct geometrically. The two reasons not to are that the appearance rule may now catch it, and that the specification may have moved - glasses stopped being acceptable in US photos in 2016, and digital upload requirements change more often than that.
A photo prepared for one document is also not automatically valid for another, even from the same country. A US passport photo is a 2 inch square with the head between 25 and 35 mm; a Schengen visa photo is 35 by 45 mm with the head between 32 and 36 mm. The person is the same; the crop is not.
The practical answer
If the photograph looks like you today and nothing on the specification has changed since, reusing it is usually fine. If you have to think about whether it still looks like you, it does not - and a retake costs fifteen minutes against an application fee and a delay of weeks.
With IDShot the retake is cheap enough that the question rarely comes up: take a new photo against a wall, let the crop land, and check it against the current rules for the document you are actually applying for.
Requirements are changed by the authorities that publish them, and the official page is the only source that settles an argument. Each preset in IDShot links to that page, so you can confirm the current wording before you submit.