Booking photos, commonly called mugshots, are the front and side photographs law enforcement takes of a person shortly after arrest, linked to a digital file that holds the person’s name, charges, and a unique booking number. The images live in law enforcement databases for years, can be fed into facial recognition systems, and may surface on background checks long after the arrest itself is resolved.
How the Photos Are Taken
The setup is more controlled than most people expect. You stand against a plain background, typically an 18-percent neutral gray surface chosen because it avoids visual interference with skin tones and hair color. An officer positions you at a marked spot and uses a fixed digital camera with three-point lighting designed to illuminate the face evenly and eliminate harsh shadows.
The sequence starts with a full-face frontal shot, where your head should occupy roughly 70 percent of the image width. You then turn for profile views. Many agencies capture both left and right profiles plus 45-degree angles, though practices vary. If only one side profile is taken, it’s usually the left. Officers look for scars, marks, and tattoos that can help with identification, so the additional angles serve a real investigative purpose beyond showing your face from the side.
You’ll be told to keep a neutral expression with both eyes open. Smiling, squinting, and grimacing change the geometry of your jawline and cheekbones, which defeats the point of creating a reliable identification record. Hats, sunglasses, and anything covering your face must come off. If you wear prescription glasses, expect to remove those too, since lenses create glare under studio lighting. Once the images are captured, the officer reviews them on a connected monitor to check focus and framing before saving the files into the agency’s booking system.
What Gets Recorded With the Photo
The photo itself is just the visible piece. Behind it sits a block of metadata that ties the image to your case. Every booking photo is tagged with a unique booking number, your full legal name, any known aliases, the date and time the photo was taken, and an agency identifier code. That timestamp matters in court and during administrative audits because it creates a verifiable chain of custody for the image.
This metadata lets the photo be indexed across criminal justice information systems at the local, state, and federal levels. When an officer in one jurisdiction runs a search, the metadata is what surfaces your record from a database hundreds of miles away. A booking photo taken at a county jail can be retrieved almost instantly by an agency in a different state.
Religious Head Coverings
If you wear a head covering for religious reasons, you generally won’t be forced to remove it for a booking photo. Law enforcement procedure manuals widely recognize an exception for religious headwear, provided your full face remains visible. The covering cannot obstruct facial features that identification systems rely on.
When an agency does need an uncovered photo for a specific law enforcement purpose, policies typically require the process to happen privately, with staff of the same gender conducting the session. Agencies that follow this approach also restrict how those uncovered photos can be shared, limiting distribution to other law enforcement for identification and prohibiting public release of the uncovered image.
Where Booking Photos End Up in Facial Recognition
Booking photos don’t just sit in a local database. Many flow into the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system, which maintains a searchable repository of over 30 million criminal mugshot photos. The system’s Interstate Photo System accepts photos submitted alongside fingerprint records, through bulk uploads from state repositories, and as standalone submissions. It also stores images of scars, marks, and tattoos alongside the facial photos.1FBI. Next Generation Identification (NGI)
When law enforcement submits a probe photo from surveillance footage or a field encounter, the system compares it against the full repository and returns a ranked list of candidates as potential investigative leads. The match isn’t treated as a positive identification on its own but as a starting point for further investigation. Any authorized law enforcement user with access to the FBI’s network can run these searches, which means a booking photo from a local arrest can be matched against an image captured by a security camera across the country.1FBI. Next Generation Identification (NGI)
Who Can See Your Booking Photo
Whether the public can see your booking photo depends heavily on which agency holds it. At the federal level, booking photos are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, but they aren’t automatically released. FOIA includes an exemption for law enforcement records whose disclosure “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 552 – Public Information; Agency Rules, Opinions, Orders, Records, and Proceedings
A 2016 decision from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals changed how federal agencies handle mugshot requests. The court held that “individuals enjoy a non-trivial privacy interest in their booking photos” and overruled an earlier decision that had set that privacy interest at zero. The court adopted a case-by-case approach: some public interests can outweigh the privacy concern, but agencies must actually weigh the balance rather than releasing photos automatically.3U.S. Department of Justice. Detroit Free Press v. DOJ, No. 14-1670
State and local agencies operate under their own public records laws, and those vary enormously. Some jurisdictions post booking photos online within hours of an arrest. Others have moved toward restricting access, requiring in-person requests, or limiting bulk releases to credentialed press. The recent trend has been toward tightening access, largely in response to commercial mugshot exploitation. Fees for obtaining official copies of a booking record vary by jurisdiction, typically ranging from a few dollars to around $50.
Commercial Mugshot Websites
The real headache for most people isn’t the government database. It’s the private websites that scrape publicly available booking photos and repost them, often alongside the charges, for anyone to find through a search engine. Some of these sites then charge fees to remove the images. More than a dozen states have enacted laws targeting the practice, with provisions that penalize companies for conditioning removal on payment.
Even where state law doesn’t specifically address mugshot websites, victims of this practice may have recourse through consumer protection statutes or unfair business practice claims. The underlying problem is that once a booking photo enters the public domain, removing it from every corner of the internet is nearly impossible without a court order directed at the original source.
Background Checks and Employment
A booking photo linked to an arrest record can surface during a background check for years. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, consumer reporting agencies generally cannot include records of arrest more than seven years old in a background report.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements on Consumer Reporting Agencies Within that seven-year window, the arrest can appear, and this is where the booking photo does real damage to people who were never convicted.
Background screening companies are required to follow reasonable procedures to ensure maximum possible accuracy. If charges were dismissed or you were acquitted, the report should include that disposition rather than showing only the arrest. Reporting an arrest without its outcome is considered misleading. The seven-year clock starts from the date of the arrest, and later events like a dismissal don’t restart or extend that period.
On the employment side, federal law offers some protection. The EEOC’s enforcement guidance states that “the fact of an arrest does not establish that criminal conduct has occurred, and an exclusion based on an arrest, in itself, is not job related and consistent with business necessity.” An employer can inquire into the conduct behind an arrest, but using the arrest alone as a disqualifier violates Title VII. At least thirteen states go further with statutes that explicitly restrict employer inquiries into arrest records.5EEOC. Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions
Getting a Booking Photo Removed
If your case was dismissed or you were acquitted, you may be eligible to petition for expungement or sealing of the arrest record, which includes the booking photo. The process varies by jurisdiction but follows a general pattern: you file a petition in the court where the charges were handled, provide your case details and criminal history, and serve the prosecutor’s office with a copy. The prosecutor then has a set window to consent or object, after which a judge either grants the petition, denies it, or schedules a hearing.
Some states have built in automatic expungement for certain outcomes. Where charges are dismissed entirely or a defendant is acquitted, the court may order expungement without requiring a petition. Other states impose waiting periods, commonly one year after the arrest, before you can file. Filing fees range widely, from nothing in some places to several hundred dollars.
Even when a court grants expungement, the practical reality is complicated. The order directs the arresting agency and court system to seal the record, but it doesn’t automatically reach every database that ever received the photo. Third-party websites, cached search results, and data aggregators may still hold copies. Expungement gives you legal grounds to demand removal from those sources, but enforcing that often requires follow-up with individual sites.
One detail that trips people up: even after expungement, the record may not be destroyed. Many states seal the record rather than deleting it, meaning law enforcement can still access it under specific circumstances like a new arrest or a court order. The booking photo continues to exist; it simply becomes invisible to the public and to most background check companies.