Vietnam entry reference
E-Visa Photo and Passport Scan Rules
The two uploads that sink most applications, what the system actually rejects, and how to get both right on the first attempt.
- Updated
- 15 August 2026
- Reading time
- 5 minutes
- Purpose
- Independent reference
Why these two files matter more than the form
Most refused e-visa applications are not refused on judgement. They fail because one of the two images does not meet a mechanical requirement, and the mechanical requirements are not obvious from the upload screen. Getting them right costs ten minutes and saves the fee, which is not refunded.
The portrait
Format and size. JPEG, under 1MB. Not HEIC, not PNG, not a screenshot of a photo.
Dimensions. A 4×6cm portrait proportion — taller than it is wide, roughly a 2:3 ratio. This is the single most common failure: people crop square for a profile picture and the system takes it as a bad frame.
Recency. Taken within the last six months, and it must plausibly be you as you look now. An old passport photo from years back is a genuine reason for refusal, not a technicality nobody checks.
Background. Plain white or off-white, evenly lit, no shadow cast behind your head. A white wall works if the light is in front of you rather than above and behind.
Your face. Straight to camera, eyes open, neutral expression. No glasses — this is enforced, and there is no medical exemption route in the online system. No hat or head covering except for religious reasons, and then not obscuring the face. Nothing cropped: the whole head plus the top of the shoulders, with clear space above the hair.
What ruins an otherwise fine photo. Beauty filters and smoothing, which most phone cameras now apply by default and which make the image not match your passport. Turn them off and retake rather than editing afterwards.
The passport scan
The whole page, not a crop. The full photo page including all four corners and both machine-readable lines along the bottom. A crop that clips a corner is rejected even if every detail is legible.
Flat and square-on. Photographed from directly above, page pressed flat, not held at an angle. A curved page throws the text out of alignment and the system reads it poorly.
No glare. The laminate is reflective. Overhead light bounces straight back into the lens; daylight from a window to one side does not. Move rather than adjusting brightness afterwards.
Colour, not greyscale. And high enough resolution that the passport number is unambiguously readable when you zoom in.
Nothing on top of it. No fingers holding the page down inside the frame, no other documents visible, no phone case shadow across the corner.
A quick self-check before you upload
Open both files at full size and ask three questions. Can a stranger read every character of the passport number without guessing? Does the portrait look like the person on that passport page? Is anything at all cropped, angled or reflecting?
If all three are clean, upload. If any is doubtful, retake it — a resubmission after refusal costs another full fee and another three working days.
If you have already been refused
A refusal on image quality is not a mark against you and does not affect a future application. The practical route is a new application with corrected files. What is worth doing first is working out which of the two images failed, because resubmitting the same passport scan with a new portrait wastes the second fee as reliably as the first.
Applying with very little time before you fly
Everything above still applies, but if you are filling this in a day or two before departure, a small number of specific mistakes are worth checking first, because they are the ones most likely to cost you a full second three-working-day cycle you do not have time for.
The single fastest thing to check: does the portrait actually look like you, now, next to the passport it will sit beside. Not a photo taken for an older passport, not one taken years ago for a different document. This is the most common cause of a rejection when every other field on the file is technically correct.
Read the passport number back to yourself, character by character. Under time pressure this is the field people mistype without noticing — zero against the letter O, one against the letter I — and a single wrong character produces a rejection with no message explaining why.
Do not compress or re-save the images just to make the upload faster. Squeezing a file under the size limit by lowering its quality often drops it below the resolution the system needs to read facial detail or the passport’s machine-readable lines clearly, trading one failure for another.
Submit once, correctly, rather than twice, quickly. A file rushed through with one field wrong costs the fee, the time, and the queue position, and a second attempt restarts the three-working-day clock from nothing. Ten unhurried minutes checking the passport number and the portrait against these points is faster, in every case that matters, than two rushed submissions.
If the file is already rejected and time is now genuinely short, the fastest correction path and what a short window does and does not allow for are covered on this site’s page about refusals.
Confirm before you book
Upload requirements were checked against the government portal on 15 August 2026 and are set by the immigration department, not by us. This page is a reference — the portal at evisa.gov.vn states the current rules and is the only version that counts.