DOCSUPRA › DS-160 Visa Photo Rejected · Español
The DS-160 refused your photo. It is almost always the 240 KB.
The short answer. The DS-160 photo tool is stricter than most people expect: JPEG only, square, between 600×600 and 1200×1200 pixels, and 240 KB maximum. A modern phone photo fails at least two of those before anyone looks at your face. The 240 KB cap is the one that catches nearly everybody.
The upload tool says the photo does not meet the requirements and offers no detail. It is rarely about the photograph. It is that a phone produces a 4 MB rectangle and the form wants a 240 KB square.
The 5 reasons, in plain words
- Over 240 KB. The single most common failure. A phone photo is typically 15 to 30 times over this limit.
- Not square. Phones shoot 4:3 or 16:9. The form requires exactly 1:1, and it will not crop for you.
- Wrong dimensions. Below 600×600 or above 1200×1200. Cropping a face out of a wide shot often drops below the floor.
- Not a JPEG. iPhones save HEIC by default. The form takes JPEG and nothing else.
- Head size or background. Same rules as a passport photo: plain white background, head filling 50–69% of the frame, no shadow.
Which of them can software fix?
Four of those five are pure file work. Converting HEIC to JPEG, squaring the crop, landing inside 600–1200 pixels and hitting 240 KB exactly are all mechanical — and doing them by hand in a generic image editor is exactly where people end up with a photo that is legal but unreadable.
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