Find out before the portal tells you
Upload the photo you were about to submit and we measure it against the Indian specification — dimensions, head size and position, background, expression, glasses. You see what would fail before Passport Seva does. Checking costs nothing; you only pay if you want the corrected file.
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Passport Seva and the OCI portal report problems in wording that does not say what to change. Here is the translation.
“Image quality is poor, application may be rejected, you can reupload.”
Passport Seva
What it means: The file cleared the size check but the picture is weak — blur, compression, a low-resolution original, or a crop from a printed photo.
The fix: Go back to the original camera file. Not a screenshot, not a messaging-app copy, not a scan of a print.
“Your image and the background are difficult to tell apart.”
OCI / e-Visa
What it means: Your clothing is too close in tone to the background, so the edge of your shoulders cannot be found. Note OCI asks for a plain light coloured background rather than white, which makes a pale top even easier to lose against it.
The fix: Wear a solid mid-tone colour — plain blue or grey. Changing the background will not help; the problem is the contrast between you and it.
“isMobileDeviceDetected failed / Please upload another photo”
Passport Seva
What it means: The portal has decided the file came straight off a phone, often because of the metadata or the way the image was resized.
The fix: Re-save the photo at 630×810 from the original, rather than uploading the camera roll file directly.
“Nothing found to be uploaded”
Passport Seva
What it means: You picked a file and the portal did not recognise it as one. Almost always the format: it takes JPEG only, and an iPhone shoots HEIC by default. PNG and WebP fail the same way.
The fix: Export or re-save as JPEG before uploading. The portal does not say the format is wrong — it just behaves as though you selected nothing.
“Photo is not as per specification”
Passport Seva / OCI
What it means: A dimension or head-size rule is out. Usually a square photo submitted where a 630×810 portrait is required.
The fix: Check which document you are actually applying for — the passport upload and OCI use different shapes.
More rejections come from this than from anything about the photograph itself. The passport upload is a portrait rectangle; OCI is a square. A square photo stretched or cropped to fit the other will not pass.
Fresh passport & renewal
The 2×2 consulate print. BLS International and VFS Global, who run Indian consular services in most countries, both ask for this one.
They do not take the same background. Passport Seva wants plain white. OCI explicitly does not — its published requirement is a “plain light colored background”, and its FAQ spells out “(not white)”. Either way, do not wear a top that matches your background: that is what causes most of the “difficult to tell apart” rejections.
Your head size and position are measured against the published Indian specification and reported as numbers.
Some things cannot be fixed in software — a pale top, glasses, a shadow. We say so rather than pretending otherwise.
630×810 for Passport Seva and 2×2 for the consulate are different shapes with different head sizes, so each is generated separately — never one crop stretched to fit the other.
Indian Photo Rejected?
Every reason, and what fixes it
Passport Renewal Photo
630×810 digital + 2×2 prints
Applying elsewhere? See passport photo requirements by country.
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