The rule nobody expects
Pakistan's online passport system accepts JPEG, JPG and PNG. That is the complete list.
It does not accept PDF.
This is genuinely unusual. Almost every government portal in the world asks for PDF, and every scanner, phone scanning app and office photocopier produces one by default. So the ordinary, careful thing to do - scan your documents properly to PDF - produces a file this portal will not take.
The three size limits, and the awkward one
The portal sets a different limit for each kind of upload:
| Upload | Limit |
|---|---|
| Supporting document | 1MB |
| Fingerprint form | 3MB |
| Photograph | 5MB |
Note which one is smallest. The photograph gets 5MB and your scanned documents get 1MB - the opposite of most portals, and the opposite of what anyone would guess. Supporting documents are also the thing you upload most of.
The file-name rule
This one is stated plainly and still catches people:
Only use numbers 0-9 and letters A-Z (upper and lower case), dashes and underscores. Avoid spaces, periods, ampersands, hashes, stars, exclamation marks and quotations.
Look at what a scanner actually names a file. Something like Scan 12.03.2026 (1).jpg contains spaces, periods and brackets - three or four violations in one ordinary file name.
Rename it to something like supporting-document-1.jpg before you upload.
What to actually do
- Convert your PDF to images. Turn each page into a JPG. One page becomes one image.
- Check the size against the 1MB supporting-document limit.
- Rename the file to letters, numbers, dashes and underscores only.
- Upload one file per slot, matching whichever document the portal asked for.
If the converted image comes out too large
Reduce the resolution, not the quality.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A scanned page is mostly text, and text is made of hard edges. JPEG compression is built for smooth gradients, so pushing quality down smears exactly the parts that carry the meaning. Dropping the resolution keeps the edges sharp and simply gives you fewer of them - which stays readable far longer.
Before you upload
- Is it a JPG or PNG? Not a PDF, whatever the file icon looks like.
- Is it under the limit for that slot? 1MB for supporting documents.
- Does the file name contain a space, a period or a bracket? Rename it.
You can check a file before uploading it — the checker knows this portal's format and size rules, and it reads the actual contents rather than trusting the file extension, which matters if something was renamed rather than converted.