India e-Visa: Getting a Passport Scan Under 300 KB Without Making It Unreadable

Most visa portals cap document uploads somewhere between 2 and 12 MB. The Indian e-Visa portal caps the passport page at 300 KB — roughly one-twentieth of what a default phone scan produces. It is the tightest mainstream limit an applicant is likely to meet, and it is paired with a minimum of 10 KB and a colour requirement, so you cannot simply crush the file into a grey smear.

This guide covers what the portal states, why a normal scan is ten to twenty times too big, and a sequence that reliably lands between 150 and 280 KB with the machine-readable zone still sharp.

What the portal states

The official e-Visa site (indianvisaonline.gov.in) publishes the upload specifications directly on the application instructions:

Three things follow that catch people out:

• The passport must be a PDF, not a JPG. Photo apps default to JPEG; you must convert.
• 300 KB applies to the supporting document too. A hospital letter or invitation on letterhead has to fit in the same budget.
• The regular (paper) visa route has different numbers. Visa agencies note that the regular visa form caps the photograph at 300 KB rather than 1 MB. If you prepared files for one route and switch, re-check.

Why a normal scan is 10–20× too big

A passport bio page scanned at a flatbed's default 300 DPI in colour is a 2,500 × 3,500 pixel image. Saved with light compression it is 3–8 MB. A phone "scan" app is often worse: 12-megapixel capture, mild JPEG, PDF wrapper, 4–6 MB.

Where the bytes go:

• Resolution. File size scales with the square of the DPI. Halving 300 DPI to 150 DPI removes about three-quarters of the data.
• Page area. A scan of the whole flatbed glass around a passport is mostly white background — cropping to the page alone typically halves the file again.
• JPEG quality. The step from quality 95 to quality 75 is invisible at document size and removes another half.
• Colour. Colour is roughly three times the data of grayscale — but you cannot use this lever here, because the portal expects a colour scan and agencies report black-and-white pages being treated as unclear.

Combine the first three and a 6 MB scan becomes 250 KB with the MRZ, the photo and the passport number all legible.

Getting to 300 KB in order

Work top-down. Most passports fit after step 3 and never need step 5.

1. Capture only the bio page. Open the passport flat, one page, good light, no glare across the laminate. Include all four corners of the page — agencies report cropped corners as a rejection cause — but nothing else.
2. Scan at 150–200 DPI in colour. This is the single biggest lever. If your scanner app has no DPI control, choose "medium" or "document" quality rather than "best".
3. Crop tightly. Remove the flatbed background or table around the page.
4. Export as PDF with JPEG inside, quality around 70–80%. Check the size. Many scans are already 150–300 KB here.
5. If still over 300 KB, compress the PDF. Open the compress tool, start with the Recommended setting, and check the size. Passport pages are among the most sensitive documents you own; the tool processes the file in your browser and does not upload it to a server.
6. Check the result at 200% zoom. The two lines of the machine-readable zone at the bottom, the passport number, the date of birth and the photo must all be crisp. If the MRZ has gone soft, go back one step — a smaller file that fails the clarity check gets rejected all the same.
7. Confirm the final size is between 10 KB and 300 KB in your file manager, not the tool's estimate.

The supporting document has the same budget

Business, medical, conference and several other e-Visa types require an additional PDF — a business card, an invitation, a hospital letter on letterhead — and it has the same 10 KB to 300 KB cap.

These are usually born-digital documents, which changes the approach:

• If you received it as a PDF, it is probably already under 300 KB. Check before doing anything.
• If it arrives as a scan of a letter, treat it exactly like the passport page: 150–200 DPI, crop, moderate JPEG quality.
• If it arrives as a Word or image file, export to PDF from the application rather than printing to an image; text stays as text and the file stays tiny.
• A letterhead with a large colour logo is the usual culprit when a one-page letter is 2 MB. Compression handles that well because the logo is the only image on the page.

The photograph is a separate file with separate rules

Do not upload the passport photo from the bio page as your e-Visa photograph. The photograph is a square JPEG between 10 KB and 1 MB of your face against a plain light background, and the portal checks proportions, framing and background rather than just size.

Most phone cameras produce a 3–5 MB, non-square image. Crop to a square with the head centred and the full head visible, export at moderate JPEG quality, and confirm the result is under 1 MB. This is an image task rather than a PDF task; the tools on this site are for the PDF uploads.

Official sources

• e-Visa instructions — Government of India — the photograph and PDF size specifications quoted above, and the per-visa-type document list
• Bureau of Immigration, India — official immigration guidance

The Government of India charges no emergency or express fee for e-Visas, and the official portal is the .gov.in address above. Third-party sites that reproduce these rules often add their own service fees; the specifications themselves come from the official page.

Before you upload

• ☐Passport bio page is a PDF, in colour, all four corners visible, no glare
• ☐Passport PDF is between 10 KB and 300 KB in your file manager
• ☐MRZ lines, passport number, date of birth and photo checked at 200% zoom
• ☐Supporting document (if your visa type needs one) is also a PDF between 10 KB and 300 KB
• ☐Photograph is a square JPEG between 10 KB and 1 MB, plain light background, no borders
• ☐Nothing password-protected or digitally signed among the files you compressed
• ☐You are on the official indianvisaonline.gov.in portal