Indian e-Visa Photo & Passport-Scan Rules: The Specs That Quietly Cause Rejections

You've filled in the long form, paid the fee, and you're staring at the final screen of the Indian e-Visa portal. Two upload boxes stand between you and your boarding pass: a square face photo and a scan of your passport's bio page. They look trivial. They are, in fact, where more applications quietly die than at any other point in the process.

The Indian e-Visa system does not gently flag a slightly-too-large file or a faintly grey background. It either accepts a perfect upload or, more often, holds your application in limbo, bounces it back, or — worst of all — grants you something on paper while a border officer at Delhi or Mumbai decides your photo doesn't match your face. The rules are precise to the kilobyte, and the portal assumes you already know them.

This is a guide to what those specs actually are, why they matter so much, and why a single bad upload can mean starting the whole thing again.

The two files that decide everything#

An Indian e-Visa application hinges on two small uploads. Get the form wrong and you can usually edit it. Get these two files wrong and you are often re-keying the entire application from scratch, paying the non-refundable fee a second time.

According to the official portal at indianvisaonline.gov.in, the requirements are exact:

Read that maximum file size for the passport scan again. 300 kilobytes. A photo straight off a modern phone is typically three to eight megabytes — ten to thirty times too large. The portal will not resize it for you. It simply refuses the file or accepts a corrupted, unreadable version that a visa officer later rejects.

Why the face photo trips up so many people#

The face-photo rules sound simple until you try to satisfy all of them at once. Here is what quietly causes the bounce-backs:

• It must be square. Equal height and width. A normal phone photo is a rectangle. Crop it carelessly and you cut off the top of the head or the chin — both of which are required, "from top of hair to bottom of chin."
• No spectacles. This catches people out constantly. If you wear glasses every day, your instinct is to keep them on. The portal's specification explicitly says without spectacles. A photo with glasses can be accepted by the upload box and then rejected during processing.
• A genuinely plain, light background. "Off-white" magnolia walls, a cream curtain with a faint pattern, a shadow cast by the lamp behind you — any of these can read as "not a plain light background." There must be no shadow on the face or the background.
• The file size window. Too small (under 10 KB) and the image is too low-resolution to be useful. Too large (over 1 MB) and it's rejected outright. The acceptable band is narrow.

The passport scan: 300 KB of unforgiving precision#

The bio page is the inside cover page of your passport carrying your photo, name, date of birth, passport number, and dates of issue and expiry. The portal demands it as a PDF, in colour, between 10 KB and 300 KB, with every detail legible.

That 300 KB ceiling is the silent killer. The instinctive approach — photograph the page, save it, upload — produces a file far too big. Compress it too hard to get under 300 KB and the text smears into an unreadable grey, which fails the legibility requirement. You are threading a needle: small enough to upload, sharp enough to read. Doing that by eye, without the right tools, is genuinely fiddly.

There are further traps that have nothing to do with file size:

• The scan must be in colour, not black-and-white or greyscale.
• It must be the bio page specifically — not the front cover, not the page with your address, not a visa sticker from a previous trip.
• Every name on the application must match the passport exactly, including middle names and the order they appear. A mismatch here is one of the most common reasons an e-Visa is queried.

Why one bad upload restarts everything#

Here is the part that catches people off guard. The Indian e-Visa fee is non-refundable, and it is charged when you submit — not when the visa is granted. The official portal states the fee is non-refundable and country-specific, with an additional bank surcharge on top.

So the sequence that ruins a week looks like this. You complete the form, upload a photo that passed the size check but had your glasses on, upload a passport scan compressed into a blur, and pay. Days later the application is rejected or comes back marked for correction. You cannot simply swap the bad file into the existing application — in many cases you start a fresh application, re-enter every detail, and pay the fee again. The first payment is gone.

And the fee is not small. India prices e-Visas by nationality on a reciprocity basis, and UK nationals pay one of the highest e-Tourist Visa fees in the world — substantially more than the standard rates other travellers see. Paying that twice because of a grey background is a painful way to learn the specs. Always check the live, country-specific figure on the official portal before you start, because these fees have been revised more than once recently.

The deadline pressure makes it worse#

The e-Visa is meant to be the easy route — apply online, no trip to a centre. But it must be applied for in advance of travel, and approval is not instant. If your first attempt bounces because of a file problem, you've lost days you may not have, and you're now racing a flight date with a fresh application and a second fee.

Travellers who leave this to the last week and then hit a rejection face an ugly choice: scramble, or fall back on a regular paper visa through a VFS centre, with its own appointments, queues, and biometrics. The whole appeal of the e-Visa evaporates the moment a 320 KB scan gets bounced.

Where this quietly goes wrong — and how to take the risk off the table#

None of these rules are arbitrary. A square JPEG between 10 KB and 1 MB, a colour PDF bio page under 300 KB, a plain background, no glasses, a face filling the frame from hairline to chin — each one is checkable and fixable. The problem is that doing all of them correctly, with the right tools, on the first attempt, while the clock runs, is exactly the kind of fiddly, unforgiving task that turns a "simple online form" into a lost afternoon and a wasted fee.

That's the work we take off your hands. We size, format, and validate your photo and passport scan to the exact portal specifications, check that every name and date matches your passport before anything is submitted, and lodge the application so it clears on the first pass — not the third.

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A correctly prepared upload is the difference between a visa that arrives on time and a non-refundable fee you pay twice. It's a small file. It deserves to be done once, properly.

Frequently asked questions#

What are the exact photo specs for the Indian e-Visa?#

A square JPEG (equal height and width), between 10 KB and 1 MB, with a plain light-coloured or white background and no shadows. It must show a full front view of your face, eyes open, without spectacles, with the head filling the frame from the top of your hair to the bottom of your chin.

What format and size must the passport scan be?#

The passport bio page must be uploaded as a PDF in colour, between 10 KB and 300 KB, with the photograph and all personal details clearly legible. It must be the biographical page specifically — not the cover or other pages.

Why does my photo pass the upload but the visa still gets rejected?#

The portal's upload box only checks the file size and format. It doesn't catch glasses, shadows, a non-plain background, or a face that's too small in the frame. Those issues are flagged later during processing — or even by an immigration officer on arrival — which is why an "accepted" upload isn't a guarantee.

Do I get my fee back if my e-Visa is rejected over a bad upload?#

No. The Indian e-Visa fee is non-refundable and is charged at submission. A rejection generally means submitting a fresh application and paying the fee again, so getting the files right the first time genuinely saves money.

How much is the Indian e-Visa for UK nationals?#

UK nationals pay one of the highest e-Visa fees of any country, on a reciprocity basis, plus a bank surcharge. Because these figures have been revised recently, check the live country-specific fee on the official indianvisaonline.gov.in portal before applying.