Why your passport photo keeps getting rejected (it's the file, not the picture)

If you've ever uploaded a passport photo to a government portal and gotten a vague "photo rejected" error, the problem usually isn't the photo. It's the file. I've been running IDPhotoSnap , a free browser-based passport photo tool, for a few months now. The single most common support question is some flavor of "my photo looks fine, why does the portal say it's wrong?" The answer almost always lives in the file's metadata, not the visible image. Here's the breakdown. The 8 file-level rejection r