Get a Scanned ID Accepted by an Online Form

The form says File type not supported. You change something and it says File too large. You change that and a person reviews it three days later and says the document number is not legible. Each rejection tells you about one gate, and there are four of them, checked in roughly that order.

Nearly every upload page states its rules somewhere, often in grey text beside the button. Write down four things: the accepted extensions, the maximum size, whether the size limit is per file or across the whole application, and whether they want both sides of a licence as one file or two. Guessing at any of these is how people make five attempts.

1. 1

   Format

   If the form wants a PDF and you have a phone photograph, Images to PDF makes it one. If it wants JPEG or PNG and what you have is a PDF, PDF to Images goes the other way, at a resolution you choose.

2. 2

   Orientation

   A licence photographed in landscape and saved into a portrait page reads sideways. Rotate PDF turns the page itself, which is a lossless change rather than a re-encode of the picture.

3. 3

   Size

   Compress PDF in Lossless cleanup first. If it is still too big, Raster pages at around 150 DPI usually clears an ordinary limit with the text intact.

4. 4

   Legibility

   Open the finished file at 100 percent and read the document number, the expiry date and your own name off the screen. If you cannot, neither can the reviewer.

The first three gates are automatic and give you an instant answer. The fourth is a person, days later, and it is the expensive one. Most legibility rejections come from the photograph rather than the file: glare from a ceiling light across the laminate, a shadow cast by your own phone, a crop so tight that a corner of the card is missing, or a hand holding the document at an angle.

Reshoot it flat on a plain surface in daylight, with the whole card inside the frame and a little space around it. That fixes more rejections than any setting in any tool.

There is a real temptation to drop the DPI until the file is tiny, because the upload then definitely succeeds. That converts an instant, cheap rejection into a slow, expensive one. Compress until you are under the limit and then stop, and check the export report's before and after sizes to see what the trade actually bought you.

Raster compression also flattens each page into an image, so a PDF that had selectable text no longer does. For an ID scan that rarely matters. For the covering letter in the same application, it does.