Photo Rejected by an Application Portal: Size, KB and Format
Portal rejections come down to three checks: pixel dimensions, file size cap and format. Work in that order — size first, then compress, then confirm format — and phone-shot photos pass on the first try.
Step 1: hit the pixel size
Dimensions are a hard gate. Scale precisely by width or height (the other edge follows proportionally); crop first when the aspect ratio differs. Never upscale — enlarging a small photo produces softness the portal's print pipeline will expose.
Step 2: get under the KB cap
JPEG quality maps roughly to file size: step down from high quality and stop at the highest tier that fits under the cap without visible loss. ID photos are mostly flat background — extremely compressible — so tens of KB is normal.
Compress before shrinking further: portals usually have minimum dimensions too, and resizing below them fails the print check.
Step 3: format and background
Most portals accept JPG only. JPG has no alpha channel — a transparent background turns black on conversion, so fill the background color first. For background-color changes: extract a transparent portrait cutout locally, fill the color in any image editor, then return to compress.