The short answer
If Kenya’s eTA site is showing you “network error” when you try to upload a photo, your internet is very probably fine. The file is too big.
The portal reports a size problem as a network problem. So people restart the router, try a different browser, move to their phone, try again tomorrow — and none of it helps, because none of it is the problem.
Get the photo under about 250 KB and try again.
The real limit, in the portal’s own words
One traveller on the Rick Steves forum worked through exactly this. Repeated “network error”. Professional passport photos from a photo shop — rejected. Only after reducing the image to 700 pixels wide did the site finally show what was actually wrong:
"The file size should not exceed 293KB."
That number is worth noticing. It is not 300 KB rounded off — it is 293 KB, which is the portal’s own wording, and it means a file you thought was comfortably "under 300" can still be refused.
Aim for 250 KB. Leave yourself the margin.
Why professional passport photos fail
This is the part that catches people out, and it is genuinely counter-intuitive.
You go to a photo studio, you pay for proper passport photos, they hand you a digital copy — and the portal rejects it. Not because the photo is wrong, but because it is too good. A print-quality file is several megabytes. Against a 293 KB ceiling, that is roughly ten times too large.
Paying for professional photos does not solve this problem and occasionally makes it worse. The photo is fine. The file is not.
What the application actually asks you to upload
There are usually four things, and only one of them is the photo:
- Your passport photo — JPEG, under 293 KB
- A photo of your passport cover
- A photo of your passport data page
- Supporting documents — hotel booking, return ticket, itinerary
Items 2, 3 and 4 can all be PDFs, and that matters, because a hotel confirmation or an e-ticket downloaded from an airline is very often several megabytes of unnecessary detail. Compressing them to an exact size takes a few seconds and removes the second most common reason these applications stall.
If a scanned document keeps failing as an image, turning it into a PDF is worth trying. Several travellers report that working where the JPEG would not.
Being straight about the photo itself
The tool on this page compresses PDFs. Your passport photo is a JPEG, and shrinking a JPEG needs an image tool, which this site does not have yet.
Rather than pretend otherwise, here is how to do it by hand:
- On a Mac — open the photo in Preview, then Tools → Adjust Size, and set the width to around 700 pixels. That is the step that worked on the Rick Steves thread.
- On Windows — open it in Photos, choose Resize, and pick a custom size around 700 px wide.
- On a phone — sending the photo to yourself over WhatsApp or as a text message shrinks it substantially, and the result is usually small enough. It is a crude trick and it works.
Afterwards, look at the picture again. Travellers report faces being cropped out of the frame by a careless resize, and the portal will reject that too — without telling you why.
Other things that go wrong, and what people did
- The webcam capture does not work. Take the photo on your phone and upload the file instead.
- The page times out mid-application. Have every file ready and sized before you start, rather than hunting for them while a session runs down.
- Word documents cause trouble. Convert to PDF first.
- Rejections do not say what was wrong. The automated check returns a generic failure. In practice: size, background, or the face not being centred and large enough.
Please do not pay someone to do this
On that same forum thread, the traveller was arranging for a computer expert to visit their home, expecting to spend around $200 to upload three photos.
That is the actual cost of an error message that says the wrong thing. The work involved is a two-minute resize, and the only reason it escalated is that the portal never told them what was wrong.
If you are at that point: it is the file size. Nothing is broken.