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Surviving an online application form on a phone

University admissions, passport applications, visa forms, GRA, SSNIT, scholarship portals, job sites. They all want documents, they all have rules, and they almost never explain the rules properly.

Almost every rejection is one of four things.

1. The file is too big

"Maximum 200KB" is the classic. A photo straight from a phone camera is three to six megabytes, which is twenty times over.

Shrinking it is not about cropping. It is about lowering the quality and the pixel size until the file fits, which for a document scan is invisible. Do that before you start the form, not at the moment it rejects you.

2. It wants one PDF and you have nine photographs

This catches everyone. You photographed nine pages of a certificate and the portal accepts exactly one file.

Put the images into a single PDF in the right order. Do not zip them; portals almost never accept a zip.

3. The format is wrong

Two common versions:

  • HEIC. If you have an iPhone, your photos are probably HEIC, and most Ghanaian portals reject the format outright without explaining why. Convert to JPG.
  • WEBP. Images saved from a web page are often WEBP, which the same portals refuse. Also convert to JPG.

If a portal says "invalid file" about a photo that opens perfectly on your phone, this is nearly always the reason.

4. The photograph is the wrong shape

Passport photo requirements are specific about dimensions and background, and a cropped selfie will not pass. Ghanaian forms are not consistent about the size they want, so read yours: some ask for 35 by 45 millimetres, some for a 50 by 50 square, some just say "passport size".

Do this before you open the form

Get everything ready first. Portals time out, they lose what you typed, and doing file surgery mid-form is how people lose an hour of work.

  1. Photograph or scan every document, in good light, flat, with the whole page in frame.
  2. Convert anything in the wrong format.
  3. Combine multi-page documents into single PDFs.
  4. Shrink everything to under the stated limit.
  5. Name the files plainly: `birth-certificate.pdf`, not `IMG_20260918_094512.jpg`. Some portals reject long names or names with spaces and symbols.
  6. Put them all in one folder so you are not hunting while the clock runs.

While you are filling it in

  • Use Chrome or Safari, not the browser inside Facebook or WhatsApp. In-app browsers frequently cannot open the file picker at all, which is why the upload button sometimes appears to do nothing.
  • Do not let the screen lock halfway. Set the screen timeout longer before you start.
  • Save or submit each section as you go, if the form allows it.
  • Screenshot the confirmation at the end, with the reference number visible. If the confirmation email never arrives, that screenshot is your proof.

If the upload button does nothing at all, it is nearly always the in-app browser. Copy the link, open Chrome, and paste it there.

What no website should ever ask you

No application portal needs your email password, and no legitimate site asks you to sign in with your Google account to "verify your documents". If you are asked for a password that is not for that portal itself, stop. That is how accounts are taken.

Tools that help with this

Free, and they work inside your browser without uploading anything.