Visa document uploads fail for three reasons, and they are easier to tell apart than the error messages suggest. Either the file is wrong (too large, wrong format, odd dimensions, an awkward filename), the scan is wrong (a corner cut off, glare across the machine-readable zone, a finger in shot), or the portal is misbehaving (a session that expired while you typed, an extension blocking the upload, a phone that cannot finish what it started). Each family has a two-minute fix. Work through them in that order: the file is the cheapest thing to check, and the portal is the one you cannot control.
Family one: the file
Over the size limit
Most portals cap uploads between 1 MB and 5 MB. The instinct is to run the image through a compressor at maximum reduction, which is how a legible passport page becomes one an automated reader rejects. Reduce in the right order instead. Scan at 300 dpi rather than 600, since nothing on a passport page needs more. Save as JPEG at around 80 per cent quality. If it is still too big, crop the empty desk around the document.
Then check your work. Open the file, zoom to 100 per cent, and read the passport number and the expiry date. If any character has gone soft, you have compressed past the point where the portal's reader can do its job.
Wrong format
Portals typically take JPEG or PNG for single images and PDF for anything multi-page. Two formats catch people out: iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, and some Android browsers save images as WebP. Both look like ordinary photos on your device and both are rejected on upload.
To convert, open the image in your computer's default viewer and use Export or Save As to produce a JPEG. To produce a PDF, open the images and use Print, then Save as PDF, which also merges several pages into one file. Renaming .heic to .jpg achieves nothing, because portals read what is inside the file rather than the label on it. Setting an iPhone's camera to Most Compatible avoids the whole problem before it starts.
Dimensions and aspect ratio
Document scans are forgiving about dimensions. Photos are strict: portals state a minimum pixel size, sometimes a maximum, and a required head-to-frame ratio, all measured automatically. If the rejections are specifically on the photo, our guide on visa photo rejections and how to pass automated checks covers the measurements. The live selfie some portals ask for is a separate check with its own causes, covered in selfie and liveness failures.
Filenames with special characters
Accents, apostrophes, ampersands, hashes and very long names break older upload handlers, and the error you get back is usually a generic failure with no explanation. Rename before you upload: passport-bio-page.jpg, bank-statement-march.pdf. Plain letters, hyphens, lowercase extension.
Family two: the scan
These come back as "unreadable", "incomplete" or "quality check failed". They are all about what an automated reader needs to see.
- All four corners in frame. Leave a margin of desk around the page. Auto-crop tools regularly trim an edge, and a bio page missing its bottom strip is missing the machine-readable zone, which is the part the reader parses.
- No glare across the machine-readable zone. Glare on a laminated page comes from a single light directly above it. Turn it off, work with daylight from the side, and tilt the passport until the shine moves off the text.
- No fingers. Anything covering the page reads as an occlusion and fails the completeness check.
- The page flat. Press the passport under a heavy book for a minute first. A page curving near the spine distorts the characters along that edge enough to break character recognition.
- Colour where colour is asked for. Scanner apps often default to a document mode that outputs greyscale, and a colour document delivered that way gets treated as a photocopy of a photocopy.
- Rescanning beats editing. Brightening, sharpening or straightening leaves traces that tampering detectors pick up, and an edited-looking document invites scrutiny. Rescanning takes two minutes. And to be plain about the line: retouching a date, a number or a name is fraud, not a formatting fix.
Family three: the portal
Session timeouts. Many government portals hold a session for fifteen to thirty minutes and drop it with no warning on screen, silently discarding whatever you uploaded. Have every document scanned, named and sized before you open the form, and where a save-and-resume reference is offered, write it down as soon as it appears.
Extensions and ad blockers. Privacy extensions frequently sit on the upload endpoint. The symptom is distinctive: the file picker opens normally, the progress bar reaches the end, and nothing is attached. Try again in a private window with extensions disabled, or in a different browser.
Mobile browsers. Phone browsers re-compress photos on send, lose form state when a tab reloads under memory pressure, and handle multi-file selection unpredictably. A laptop finishes what a phone starts, so photograph documents on the phone if that is easiest, then submit from a computer.
Unstable connections. An upload interrupted midway arrives as a truncated file, which the portal reports as corrupt. Hotel wifi causes more of these than any file problem.
The checklist to run before you start
- Every required document scanned, using the documents an electronic visa application usually asks for as your list.
- Filenames plain: letters, hyphens, lowercase extensions.
- Every file under the stated size limit and still legible at 100 per cent zoom.
- Every file in an accepted format, converted rather than renamed.
- A computer with a stable connection and a browser without blocking extensions.
When the error persists
Sometimes it is them. Government systems run maintenance windows, usually overnight in the destination's own time zone, and they rarely announce them anywhere a traveler would look. Upload endpoints also fail on their own for an hour or two at a time.
So if the same file has failed three times and it passes the checklist above, stop. Wait an hour and try the identical file again before rebuilding your documents from scratch, because rescanning everything to fix an outage costs you an evening and changes nothing. If it still fails the next day, check whether the destination offers another submission channel, or apply through a service that submits on your behalf and can tell you which step is breaking.
If the failure comes at the payment step instead, that is a different problem with its own causes, covered in what to do when an eVisa payment fails.