The advice everybody gives is wrong for three countries
Search for help with a visa photo and every result tells you the same thing: make it smaller. Compress it. Get it under 50 KB.
For three of the ten portals we have verified, following that advice guarantees rejection.
| Portal | Minimum | What the usual advice produces |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand visa / NZeTA | 512 KB | a 50 KB file, ten times too small |
| Australia ImmiAccount | 70 KB | rejected |
| United Kingdom passport | 50 KB | borderline at best |
| India SSC — signature | 10 KB | rejected |
New Zealand's floor is seven times the next highest minimum we found anywhere, and it sits inside a range — between 512 KB and 3.14 MB — that almost nothing else on the internet mentions.
Why this is so easy to get wrong
The rejection message does not say "too small". It usually says the photo does not meet requirements, or simply fails to upload, and every instinct — plus every guide you can find — points you towards compressing it further.
So the natural response to the rejection makes the problem worse. People compress again, get rejected again, and conclude the portal is broken.
The most common route into this is reusing a photo. You compress one to 150 KB for a portal that caps at 200 KB. Months later you apply somewhere else with the same file. It was correct for the first portal, and it is automatically wrong for New Zealand.
How to fix it
Making a file bigger is not something most photo tools are built for, but the fix is simple:
- Go back to the original from your camera or phone if you still have it. That file is almost certainly above every minimum here, and starting from it avoids the next point entirely.
- Save it again at a higher quality setting. This increases the file size without changing what the photograph shows.
- Or use larger pixel dimensions, as long as you stay inside whatever maximum the portal publishes.
⚠️ Do not upscale a file that is already heavily compressed. The detail was discarded the first time it was saved, and enlarging the result does not bring it back — it just makes a blurry photo into a larger blurry photo. If the only copy you have is the 40 KB one, retake the photograph.
Clearing the minimum is not the same as passing
File size is the crudest of the rules. It is worth being blunt about what it does not mean: a 2 MB photo with a shadow behind the head, the wrong background colour, or a head filling the wrong proportion of the frame is rejected exactly as firmly as a 40 KB one.
The minimum only stops the file being disqualified before anyone looks at the photograph. Each authority publishes separate rules about the picture itself, and the sources on this page link to them.
Check before you upload
Check my photo reads your file in your browser and tells you whether it clears the minimum — and the maximum, the pixel range and the format — for the portal you pick. Nothing is uploaded.
The full table of what each portal requires is on visa photo size requirements by country.