Photo Rejected — Data Not Readable

Four things cause most rejections: wrong document type, a photo of a screen, blurry text, or a corner cut off. Fix one specific thing, then retake.

How to fix

Use the original physical document. Not a screenshot, not a photo of a phone screen, not a print-out. Take it out of any plastic sleeve before shooting.

If your country uses paper ID slips (printouts, registration receipts), they are usually not accepted. Use a passport, driver’s license, or chip-card ID instead.

Take a sharp photo:

• Lay the document flat on a dark, non-reflective surface — table, dark cloth
• Use daylight near a window — indoor bulbs are too dim and cause motion blur
• Turn off the flash — it creates a glare patch that hides text
• Hold the phone close enough that the document fills the frame, with a small margin on every side
• Tap the text in the camera preview to lock focus, wait one second, then shoot

Check before submitting. Zoom into the photo on your phone. Can you read every line yourself? Are all four corners visible? For passports — are the two lines at the bottom (MRZ) sharp? Any glare patches across the data? If anything is “not quite”, retake. One sharp photo gets through faster than five blurry retries.

Watch out for

• Photographing through plastic — laminated cards or a phone case with a clear pocket cause faint reflections that break OCR
• Holding the document in your hand — your fingers cover an edge, and the paper bends slightly causing distortion
• Re-uploading the same image — if it failed once, the system will fail it again. Retake at a different angle or in better light