I'm having a bit of trouble with my Indian visa

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

They came back to say that the quality of the upload of a pdf scan of my passport isn't good enough. It actually looks ok to me, but my photo is in black and white (I don't know why when I submitted a colour photo to the passport office) and I have silver grey hair, very pale skin and it's against a white background so I think the problem might be that it's just eyes, eyebrows and a mouth with no defining edge. I'm not sure that there's much that I can do about it. I'm going to re-scan to see if it can be a bit better.

I took a picture of myself on my phone in a photo booth (like where you do your passport picture) and uploaded that and it worked fine! It needs to be small enough (file size) that it will upload, but maybe try that.

The photo was ok, it's the passport scan that I'm having trouble with.

Sorry, that wasn't clear. They wanted a photo, which seems to have worked fine. They also want a scan of my passport, and I wonder if the photo on the passport page is the problem.

However I have just noticed that I hadn't signed my passport, so I wonder if it's that.

Ah sorry! I also just took a photo of my passport and uploaded it. If your passport isn't signed try it again and see if that's the issue, otherwise maybe try taking a photo of it open and upload that?

It is tricky to make it a small enough file to upload, it has to be under 300 kb which is pretty tiny and hard to scan in low enough quality to be a small file but high enough quality to be legible.

I've just done my Mum's applications now. Her photo is a bit out of focus, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed because it was quite a bit of coaching to get even that.

As an aside, I'm never going on holiday with her again, I have suddenly become her personal assistant. Not only that but personal assistant to someone who is very anti the whole concept of personal assistants and will not cooperate by giving necessary information. eg "What countries have you visited in the last ten years?" "Oh, I couldn't possibly know that".

Oh god all the questions, that was the most irritating visa to apply for 😅 I had gotten most of it filled in and the website crashed and I had to do it all again 😬 also, was a huge pain listing out every country from the last decade!

Good luck with the application and with being your mums PA 🤣 once I'd gotten the application in they approved me quite quickly though, which was good at least!

Enjoy your hols!

Yes, it was so LONG. I had to do visa applications for Nepal for both of us too, and it was next to nothing by comparison. So much spurious data, the nationality and previous nationalities of me, my parents and my DH, who knows what they do with all that information.

Plus, I ended up just getting my Mum to list the countries that she had stamps for in her passport, because she kept phoning me back to ask me if X country was more than 10 years ago or not. How would I know?

India is notorious for red tape, have my whole family there and the forms we had to fill in during covid times were insane. They specialise in changing rules as they wish without any warning.

This brings back fond memories of taking in my DFs Indian visa application in person to India House back in the 90s. No online application then, it was go in to the Embassy in London yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

Masses of paper forms to fill in and long queues to stand in. First queue to hand in forms and stand there while they slowly read through all the forms and asked many baffling questions. Then another queue to pay the visa fee (cash only) and get an officially stamped receipt. Then another long queue to hand in all documents and receipt at another window. Where they put a rubber band round the lot and literally chucked the lot onto a huge pile of similar bundles on the floor at the back of the office!

Then had to return the next day to pick up the passport with the visa. Only one long queue to stand in this time! Had to take two half days annual leave to deal with the whole process.

OK, I feel better about this experience now. Thanks @OnGoldenPond

I'm sure they have a virtual pile of paperwork somewhere but somehow they manage to pull a visa out of the chaos!

RE the passport scan, I found taking a good quality phone pic (large size), sending to someone on WhatsApp (to resize whilst retaining quality) was the only way to get a legible scan whilst staying within the tiny image size requirement

Ooh, thanks for the tip @Brindelz. If my current attempt doesn't work out I'll give that a go.

Hi just curious did you get the issue sorted.Im having the same issue and panicking

I’m really sorry @Ittakeslonger but I have absolutely NO memory of how I did it in the end. I just know that I did eventually make it work. I think my brain is protecting me from the horror. 😂. I think I went the photo route not a scan.

We applied for Indian visas this week. It was not much fun. One of us realised that the lower half of the second row of the machine-readable numbers on the passport page was cut off, and expected a rejection, but it all turned out OK.

We have a printer/scanner and someone in the house who knows "computer stuf". Their tips are:

• Use a scanner (if you don't have one, work does) to make a JPG image. A scanner will do a far better job than a phone camera.
• Print the JPG to a PDF format. If it's too big, shrink the JPG.
• Repeat until the PDF come in just under 300Kb.

It's completely nuts that the passport is limited to 300k when your extra photo is allowed to be 1MB, but dealing with shitty IT system limitations is part of travel these days.

What countries have you visited in the last ten years?

Do not feel the need to list anywhere for which there is no stamp in your passport. 😉

Also, there is a help desk e-mail address, [email protected]. They might be helpful (or of course they could be useless).

How soon ahead of going can you apply? We're not going until October.