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

You have filled in the long form, and you are 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 biographic page. They look trivial. They are, in fact, where more applications quietly die than at any other point in the process.

The portal does not gently flag a slightly-too-large file. It refuses it, or it accepts something unreadable that a visa officer rejects days later. So this guide starts with the numbers, exactly as the government portal states them, then explains the traps behind each one.

The specification, exactly as the portal states it#

These are the requirements published on the official portal at indianvisaonline.gov.in, in the portal's own wording.

Digital photograph (e-Visa): "Format - JPEG", "Size: Minimum 10 KB, Maximum 1 MB", "The height and width of the Photo must be equal", "Photo should present full face, front view, eyes open and without spectacles", "Center head within frame and present full head from top of hair to bottom of chin", "Background should be plain light colored or white background", "No shadows on the face or on the background", "Without borders".

Passport biographic page and supporting documents (e-Visa): "Format - PDF", "Size: Minimum 10 KB, Maximum 300 KB", showing the photograph and details. All documents must be in English.

One number that differs on the regular (paper) visa form: the photograph there is also a square JPEG, but capped at 300 KB, not 1 MB, and the instructions add that the "head should measure 1 inch to 1-3/8 inches (25mm to 35mm)". If you have prepared a file for one route and switched to the other, check the ceiling before you upload.

Spec	e-Visa face photo	e-Visa passport page	Regular visa photo
File format	JPEG	PDF	JPEG
Minimum size	10 KB	10 KB	10 KB
Maximum size	1 MB	300 KB	300 KB
Shape	Square, equal height and width	Full page, in colour	Square, equal height and width
Background	Plain light coloured or white, no shadows	Clear and legible	Plain light coloured or white, no shadows
Face	Full front view, eyes open, no spectacles	Photo and all details visible	Full front view, head 25 to 35 mm
Borders	None	Not applicable	None

Read that passport figure again. 300 kilobytes. A photo straight off a modern phone is three to eight megabytes — ten to thirty times too large. The portal will not resize it for you.

What the portal means by the "biographic page" of your passport#

This phrasing sends a lot of people to the wrong page, so it is worth being literal about it.

The biographic page — also written biographical page, and often called the bio page or the data page — is the laminated page inside your passport that carries your photograph, surname and given names, date and place of birth, nationality, sex, passport number, date of issue and date of expiry, with the two lines of machine-readable code across the bottom. In a British passport it is the stiff polycarbonate page at the back. In an Indian passport it is page 2, facing the page that carries your address.

It is not the front cover, not the page with your address or parents' names, and not a visa sticker from a previous trip. Uploading the wrong page is a common and entirely avoidable query.

Scan or photograph that one page, in colour, straight on, with all four corners in the frame and no glare across the laminate, then convert it to a PDF between 10 KB and 300 KB. That is the whole requirement.

Why the face photo trips up so many people#

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

• It must be square. Equal height and width, in the portal's own words. A phone photo is a rectangle. Crop it carelessly and you lose 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 constantly. If you wear glasses every day your instinct is to keep them on, but the specification says without spectacles. A photo with glasses can pass the upload box and be rejected during processing.
• A genuinely plain, light background. Magnolia walls, a cream curtain with a faint pattern, or a shadow cast by a lamp behind you can all read as "not plain". There must be no shadow on the face or the background.
• The size band. Under 10 KB and the image is too low-resolution to be useful; over 1 MB and it is refused outright.
• No borders. A white frame added by a photo app, or the printed border from a photo-booth strip you have re-photographed, is explicitly out of spec.

Note the one place where the Indian visa portal and the OCI portal genuinely differ: the visa photo accepts a plain light or white background, whereas the OCI photo must be light and not pure white. If you are preparing files for both, they are not interchangeable — that, and the OCI portal's face-height rule, are covered in our guide to every portal upload error, decoded.

"Indian visa rejected — photo": what is actually happening#

There are two different failures hiding behind the same phrase, and the fix is different for each.

The upload box refuses the file. This is a pure file-format problem: the image is not JPEG, it is not square, or it sits outside the size band. Nothing about your appearance is being judged. Crop, convert and recompress, and it goes through.

The application is queried or refused after submission. Here a human has looked at it. The usual causes are spectacles, a shadow on the face or the wall, a background that is not plain, a head too small in the frame, a low-resolution image blown up, or a photo of a printed photo. The upload box checks bytes and shape; it does not check any of this.

If the file itself is the problem — the wrong shape, the wrong format, a 4 MB phone photo, or a passport scan you cannot get under 300 KB without turning it to mush — that is a preparation job, and it is the same preparation work we do for OCI and passport uploads.

What a rejection actually costs#

The Indian e-Visa fee is non-refundable and is charged when you submit, not when the visa is granted. In many cases you cannot swap a bad file into an existing application — you start a fresh one, re-key every detail, and pay again.

For UK nationals that second payment is not trivial, because India prices e-Visas by nationality on a reciprocity basis and the UK sits near the top of the scale. From the government's country-wise fee schedule dated 9 July 2026:

Variant	Fee for UK nationals	Notes
e-Tourist, 30 days (April to June)	US$10	Multiple entry
e-Tourist, 30 days (July to March)	US$25	Multiple entry
e-Tourist, 1 year	US$40	Stay capped at 180 days in aggregate per calendar year
e-Tourist, 5 years	US$484	Reciprocal rate, well above the global default
e-Business	US$242	Per-visit stay cap applies
e-Medical or e-Medical Attendant	US$129	Short validity

On top of the fee there is a bank charge of 3% on a card payment, or 4% through PayPal. Two corrections worth making while we are here, because older guides — including earlier versions of this page — get them wrong: the 30-day e-Tourist visa is multiple entry, not double entry, and the one-year and five-year visas cap your stay at 180 days in aggregate per calendar year, not 180 days per visit. Visa on arrival is not available to UK citizens at all.

If you are going to be travelling to India regularly for the rest of your life and you are of Indian origin or married to someone who is, the honest observation is that you may be paying visa fees you never needed to pay. An OCI card is a one-off application that replaces the visa entirely, for life.

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 and approval is not instant. If your first attempt bounces on a file problem, you have lost days you may not have, and you are 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 appointment, queue and biometrics. The whole appeal of the e-Visa evaporates the moment a 320 KB scan gets bounced.

Getting it right first time#

None of these rules are arbitrary, and none of them are hard in isolation. A square JPEG between 10 KB and 1 MB. A colour PDF of the biographic page between 10 KB and 300 KB. A plain background, no glasses, no borders, the head filling the frame from hairline to chin. The difficulty is doing all of them correctly, on the first attempt, with a flight date approaching.

Check the two files against the numbers above before you go anywhere near the payment screen. It is 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 on the face or the background. It must show a full front view of your face, eyes open, without spectacles, with the head centred and the full head visible from the top of your hair to the bottom of your chin, and without borders. On the regular paper visa form the same square JPEG is capped at 300 KB rather than 1 MB.

What format and size must the passport scan be?#

The passport biographic page must be uploaded as a PDF, in colour, between 10 KB and 300 KB, with the photograph and every personal detail clearly legible. The same 10 KB to 300 KB PDF limit applies to supporting documents such as invitation or hospital letters, and all documents must be in English.

Which page of my passport is the "biographic page"?#

The laminated page carrying your photograph, name, date and place of birth, nationality, passport number, and the dates of issue and expiry, with the machine-readable code across the bottom. In a British passport it is the stiff polycarbonate page at the back; in an Indian passport it is page 2. It is not the front cover, not the page with your address or parents' names, and not a visa sticker from an earlier trip.

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

The upload box only checks the file's format, shape and size. It does not catch spectacles, shadows, a background that is not plain, a head too small in the frame, or a low-resolution image scaled up. Those are picked up later by a human during processing — or by an immigration officer on arrival — which is why an accepted upload is not 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 rather than on approval. A rejection generally means starting a fresh application, re-entering every detail, and paying the fee again, so getting the two files right the first time genuinely saves money.

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

UK nationals pay a reciprocal rate well above the global default. On the government schedule dated 9 July 2026 the 30-day e-Tourist visa is US$10 from April to June and US$25 from July to March, the one-year is US$40, the five-year is US$484, e-Business is US$242 and e-Medical is US$129. A bank charge of 3% applies on a card, or 4% through PayPal. Fees are revised periodically, so confirm the live figure before paying.

Is the 30-day e-Tourist visa single entry or multiple entry?#

Multiple entry. Older guidance describing it as double entry is out of date. The one-year and five-year e-Tourist visas are also multiple entry, but they cap your stay at 180 days in aggregate per calendar year rather than 180 days per visit — the per-visit cap belongs to the e-Business visa. Visa on arrival is not available to UK citizens.

Can I use my Indian e-Visa photo for an OCI application?#

No. The two portals disagree on the background: the visa photo may be plain light or white, while the OCI photo must be light and specifically not pure white. The OCI portal also enforces a face-height ratio of 0.3 to 0.6 of the image height and a 10 KB to 200 KB size band, against the visa portal's 10 KB to 1 MB. Prepare a separate file for each.