Read the requirement completely first
Most rejection loops start with a half-read specification. A typical form states a pixel dimension, a file size range, a format, and a background colour. People read the maximum file size, ignore everything else, and then spend an hour compressing a file that was never rejected for being too big.
Before you touch the image, write down all four values from the official instruction page for the form you are filling. Not from a coaching site, not from a forum post, and not from last year's version, because these change. The portal's own instruction page is the only source that counts.
The minimum size nobody mentions
This is the single most common cause of a baffling rejection. Many portals specify a range, not a ceiling. If the requirement is 20 KB to 200 KB and you proudly compress down to 11 KB, the upload fails, and the error message says nothing about a minimum.
People then compress harder, which makes it worse, and the loop continues. If your file is being rejected and it is already small, try making it larger. Aim comfortably inside the range rather than at either edge.
Dimensions and aspect ratio
A form asking for 200 by 230 pixels usually means it. Some portals resize on your behalf, many do not, and some accept the file and then display it squashed because your aspect ratio did not match theirs.
Crop to the correct shape before you resize. If you resize a square photo into a tall rectangle without cropping, faces stretch, and a stretched face can be rejected at the verification stage long after the upload succeeded, which is a far more expensive failure than an upload error.
The format trap
Most government portals accept JPEG and nothing else. A few also take PNG. Almost none accept WebP, HEIC or AVIF.
This matters because modern phones do not produce JPEG by default. iPhones
save HEIC unless you change a setting, and many Android cameras now default to
HEIF or WebP for some modes. The file may show a .jpg extension
after some conversions while the actual contents are something else, and a
strict validator reads the contents.
Convert properly rather than renaming. Renaming a HEIC file to
.jpg changes nothing about the bytes inside, and the portal will
reject it. Our image converter produces real JPEG
output.
Filename rules also exist and are easy to miss. Some portals require the file
to be named exactly photo.jpg and signature.jpg, and
silently fail on anything else.
Background and lighting
Plain white or light grey is the usual requirement, and “plain” means uniform. A white wall with a shadow across it is not a plain background, and automated checks increasingly catch this.
Shooting against a window, wearing white against a white wall so the outline disappears, and heavy shadow under the chin from overhead lighting are the three most common causes. Diffuse daylight from the side, standing a step away from the wall so your shadow falls behind you, fixes nearly all of it.
If the background is the only problem, removing it and replacing it with a flat colour is faster than reshooting, though for identity documents check whether the form permits an edited background.
Face coverage and framing
Many specifications require the face to occupy a particular proportion of the frame, often around 70 to 80 percent of the height. A photo taken from too far away fails this even though it looks perfectly reasonable.
Other framing rules that cause verification failures rather than upload failures: eyes open and clearly visible, no sunglasses, no hats unless worn for religious reasons, neutral expression, both ears visible on some forms, and the head not tilted. Verification rejection is worse than upload rejection because you usually find out much later.
Signature-specific problems
A signature has its own set of failure modes. It should be black or dark blue ink on plain white paper, scanned or photographed straight on, cropped close to the signature itself with a small margin.
Photographing a signature on lined or squared paper is a frequent rejection cause, as is a grey cast from poor lighting that makes the validator read the background as not-white. Scan at a moderate resolution; 600 dpi captures paper texture that makes the file large and the background noisy.
A checklist to break the loop
- Open the portal's own instruction page and write down format, pixel dimensions, the file size range including the minimum, and background.
- Confirm the real format of your file, not just its extension.
- Crop to the right aspect ratio, then resize to the stated dimensions.
- Compress to sit comfortably inside the size range, not at its edge.
- Check the filename against any naming rule.
- View the result at full size before uploading.
Work through that in order and the great majority of rejections resolve on the first attempt.