Why your exam photo keeps getting rejected

The portal rarely tells you what is wrong

Most recruitment portals validate an upload against several rules at once and report a single generic failure. That leaves applicants changing things at random — usually compressing the file further, which frequently makes the problem worse rather than better.

The checks fall into three groups: file properties, image geometry, and the content of the photograph itself. Work through them in that order, because the first two are the ones a tool can fix in seconds.

File property failures

• File larger than the stated maximum — the only failure most people anticipate.
• File smaller than the stated minimum. A clean photograph on a plain background can compress below 20 KB without looking degraded, and the portal will reject it. Raising the resolution is the only fix; lowering compression cannot make a file bigger.
• Wrong format. Several portals accept JPEG only, and silently truncate a PNG or WEBP upload rather than converting it.
• A transparent PNG, which renders with a black background once the portal flattens it.

Geometry failures

• Wrong aspect ratio. Stretching a photo to reach the required pixel dimensions distorts the face, and this is checked manually at the document verification stage even when the upload succeeds.
• Dimensions outside the published range. UPSC, for example, publishes an explicit 350–1000 pixel window.
• The face occupying too little of the frame. As a rule the head should fill roughly two-thirds of the image height.

Content failures

• Caps, hats or tinted glasses. Plain prescription spectacles are generally fine; anything that obscures the eyes is not.
• A busy, dark or patterned background instead of a plain light one.
• A photograph of a printed photograph. Scanning or re-photographing a physical print introduces moiré patterns and colour shifts that are easy to spot.
• Missing name and date caption where the exam requires it, as UPSC does.

The order to fix things in

Start with the photograph itself, because no amount of resizing rescues a bad source image. Take a fresh photo against a plain white wall in even daylight, facing the camera squarely, with no cap and no shadow behind your head.

Only then resize. Crop to the required ratio first, and let the compression aim for the middle of the accepted size range rather than the edge of it — a file at 49 KB against a 50 KB limit can tip over if the portal re-encodes it.