Your document photo was rejected. Here is why, and how to fix the file.

They refused your document at the counter. You can fix it tonight.

You took the day off, queued, and were told to come back with a legible copy. Nobody explained what legible means. It means a reviewer can read every field without effort — and that is a property of the image, not of the paper.

The 5 reasons, in plain words

• Faint or grey print. Guide text on official forms is printed in light grey on purpose. A bad copy turns it into nothing, and a reviewer sees a form with missing fields.
• A shadow across the page. Your own hand or head blocking the light. The reviewer sees a document that is half dark.
• Photographed at an angle. The page becomes a trapezoid, the lines stop being straight, and text near the far edge stretches.
• Glare from a flash or window. A bright patch that erases whatever was under it — often a stamp, a signature or a number.
• Too low resolution. Below the 300 DPI most offices expect, small print stops resolving and a number becomes a guess.

Which of them can software fix?

None of these require a scanner. Flattening the perspective, evening out the light, recovering faint print and exporting at the resolution the office expects are all done on the photograph you already took — and the document never leaves your device while it happens.

They will not accept the photo of your licence. It is the glare on the plastic.

You sent it three times and it came back three times. Nobody tells you it is the reflection — they tell you it is not legible, which sounds like it is your fault.

The 5 reasons, in plain words

• Glare on the laminate. The most common cause by a distance. A flash or a ceiling light bounces off the plastic and erases whatever is under it, usually the licence number or the face.
• Photographed at an angle. Held above the card, the rectangle becomes a trapezoid. Readers reject the shape before a human sees it.
• Too dark. Your own shadow over the card — common precisely because you lean over it to take the picture.
• Corners cut off. Portals want all four corners visible. A photo that clips one is refused even when everything else is perfect.
• Too large, or HEIC. Many portals cap at 5 MB and refuse HEIC, which is what every recent iPhone shoots by default.

Which of them can software fix?

An ID is exactly the document where uploading it is the worst idea. Removing glare, flattening the perspective and evening out the light all run on your own device here, so the one thing you least want sitting on someone else’s server never gets there.

Your document upload keeps failing. Here is why.

Upload forms are famously bad at saying what went wrong. "Something went wrong, please try again" covers six completely different problems, and trying again fixes exactly none of them. Here they are in the order they actually occur.

1. The format is not accepted

An iPhone saves photos as HEIC by default, and most receiving systems cannot open it. The upload often fails with no message at all, because the file never gets far enough to produce one. Converting to JPEG or PDF solves it. To stop it recurring: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible.

How to tell it is this

The failure is instant, and the same file fails on every attempt. If a different photo taken with a different app uploads fine, it is the format.

2. The file is over the size limit

The second most common, and the one people diagnose last, because the limit is usually written somewhere you did not read. The failure usually arrives after a long wait, at the very end of the progress bar.

3. The dimensions are outside the allowed range

Photo uploads in particular often have a minimum and a maximum pixel size, and a square requirement. A file can be well under the size limit and still be refused for being 1400 pixels wide where 1200 is the ceiling.

4. The session timed out

A large file on a slow connection can outlast the login session. The upload appears to complete and then bounces you to a sign-in page, or fails with a generic error. A smaller file uploads faster and simply avoids the problem.

How to tell it is this

It fails at the end, not the start, and the same file sometimes works on a faster connection.

5. The filename

Accented characters, emoji, hashes, ampersands and very long names still break older systems. Rename to plain letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores before assuming the file is at fault.

6. The portal is broken and your file is fine

It happens more than anyone admits, particularly near a filing deadline. If a small, plainly named JPEG also fails, the problem is not your document. Try a different browser once, then wait rather than re-uploading twenty times — repeated failed attempts occasionally trip rate limits and lock you out.

The five-minute triage

1. Check the file extension. If it is .heic, convert it.
2. Check the file size against the stated limit.
3. Check the pixel dimensions if it is a photo upload.
4. Rename to plain characters.
5. If a tiny test file also fails, it is not you.

Why a screenshot of your document gets rejected

A screenshot records what your screen is showing, at the resolution your screen is showing it. That sounds obvious until you work out what it means for a full page of text: the file is not slightly under the requirement, it is a third of it.

The arithmetic

Suppose you open a Letter page in a viewer and it fills the height of a 1080-pixel-tall screen. The page is 11 inches tall, so you have captured 1080 ÷ 11 ≈ 98 pixels per inch. A 4K display roughly doubles that to about 196 — still short of 300, and only if the page really does fill the screen.

Why it looks fine to you

Because you are looking at it on the same screen that produced it, at the same size. It is only when the file is opened at full size, or printed, that the missing detail shows — and the person who opens it that way is the reviewer.

The other three reasons a screenshot gets flagged

• Interface furniture. Scroll bars, tabs, a browser address bar and a clock all end up in the file. It reads as a picture of a screen, not as a document.
• It is visibly a partial view. A screenshot usually shows what fitted on the screen, so the bottom of the page is missing — and an incomplete document is refused on its own.
• PNG size. Screenshots are usually PNG, which is lossless and large for a page of text, so the file can be both low-resolution and over the size limit at the same time.

What to send instead

1. If the document exists as a file, send that file. Do not photograph or screenshot a PDF you already have — export or download it.
2. If it only exists on paper, photograph it with the page filling the frame, then straighten it and even out the lighting.
3. If it only exists inside a web portal, look for a download or "print to PDF" option before resorting to a capture.

Print to PDF is the underused answer. It re-renders the page as a document at full page size, rather than recording what the screen happened to show.