Indian e-Visa applications document requirements

Who this guide is for

Most people filling in an Indian e-Visa form are foreign nationals planning a trip to India, often applying from a phone in a hotel, an office or at home abroad. Others are Indian hosts, colleagues or family members helping a visitor get the files ready. Whichever you are, the uploads are the same: a digital photograph, a PDF of the passport bio page and, for some visa types, a supporting document.

The rules described here are the Indian e-Visa upload requirements as checked on 2 Oct 2026, published by the Government of India. They can change without much notice, so always confirm them on the official Indian e-Visa page before you apply. Use only that official site for the application itself.

The photograph: square, plain and front-facing

The e-Visa photo is unusual because it must be square, with the height equal to the width. A normal phone picture is a rectangle, so it will need cropping. The other requirements are:

• a JPEG file between 10 KB and 1 MB (1024 KB)
• full face, taken from the front, with your eyes open
• no glasses
• your head centred in the frame
• a plain light or white background, with no shadows and no border

To take it, stand about an arm's length in front of a pale wall, facing a window so daylight falls evenly on your face. Ask someone else to hold the phone at your eye level; a selfie at arm's length tends to distort features and tilt the head. Remove your glasses, look straight at the lens and keep a neutral expression.

Then crop to a square with your head in the middle using Image Crop. If your phone saves photos as HEIC, as many iPhones do by default, convert the picture to JPEG with Image Convert. Phone photos are often still larger than 1 MB after cropping. If yours is, Image Fit to KB brings it into the allowed range; check afterwards that it is still square.

The passport bio page as a PDF

Every e-Visa type asks for the passport page that carries your photo and personal details. It must be a PDF between 10 KB and 300 KB and clearly readable. Check that your name, passport number, dates and the machine-readable lines along the bottom are all sharp, and that they match what you type into the form.

Scan the open passport flat, or photograph it on a dark table in good light with no glare across the laminate. If you only have a photo, Images to PDF turns the JPEG into a PDF. If the result is over 300 KB, use Compress PDF with a target a little below the limit, then zoom in to check the small print survived.

Supporting documents in English

Business, medical and some other e-Visa types also need a supporting document, such as a business card, a hospital letter or an invitation. These follow the same PDF range of 10 KB to 300 KB, and they must be in English. If your hospital or host company normally writes in another language, ask them for an English version well before you apply rather than translating it yourself.

A business card is small, so scan or photograph it close up and crop away the table around it, otherwise the text becomes tiny on the page. For a letter that runs over more than one page, keep the pages in order in a single PDF.

When a file is too small

Each e-Visa upload has a minimum of 10 KB as well as a maximum, and that floor catches people out. A very compressed photo or a business card saved at low quality can fall below it. Do not stretch the picture to make it bigger; instead, start again from the original, or use Meet Minimum Size to raise the file above the minimum.

Before you upload, run your photo and PDFs through Portal Preflight for the e-Visa. It checks each file's format and KB range against the rules above, so you can fix a problem before the form sees it. These DocNimble tools run in your browser, and your passport and photo are not uploaded to DocNimble.