Your UK visa document did not upload. Here is how to tell.

You uploaded the bank statements, the screen moved on, and now you cannot tell whether they arrived. The appointment is in two days and there is no confirmation email to check.

This uncertainty is built into the structure of the process, and understanding why makes it easy to resolve.

Your evidence does not go to GOV.UK

You apply on GOV.UK. You upload evidence somewhere else. Supporting documents are handled by commercial partners under contract, and GOV.UK confirms this directly on its page for UK Visa and Citizenship Application Services, which states you can provide supporting documents either by uploading them into the UKVCAS online service or by having them scanned at your appointment.

That page currently links to tlscontact.com for service point locations. Applicants in the UK have seen this contract change hands, so guidance written a few years ago naming a different operator can be describing a system that no longer exists. Outside the UK, the partner is usually VFS Global or TLScontact depending on the country.

The consequence is the thing to hold on to. The rules applied to your file at the moment of upload are the partner portal’s rules, not the Home Office’s, and they can change without any GOV.UK page changing.

What GOV.UK does publish

Some figures are official, and these were checked on 16 August 2026.

Formats. GOV.UK guidance on uploading evidence states that photos of documents should be PNG, JPG or JPEG, and that scans may be PDF, PNG, JPG or JPEG. It also asks that the document lies flat against the scanner, that nothing covers the information, that the area is well lit and the document is in focus.

EU Settlement Scheme. GOV.UK states you can upload a maximum of 10 documents as evidence of UK residence, and that each document must be no more than 6MB in size. That is a hard published figure for that route.

The digital photo. For a photo taken for a visa application or permission, GOV.UK requires a jpg or jpeg of at least 50KB and no more than 6MB, at least 600 pixels wide and 750 pixels tall, vertically orientated and not mirrored or flipped.

Note the minimum size on the photo. It is the one place in this process where a file can be too small, and compressing a photo aggressively can push it under 50KB and cause a rejection that looks nonsensical.

The numbers we are not going to give you

Figures for the partner portals circulate constantly, quoted with confidence, and they contradict each other. We could not confirm any of them against an official page, and the operator sites are not reliable published sources in the way GOV.UK is. At the time of checking, one of them was not even serving a valid security certificate.

So the honest answer is a method rather than a number. Read the limit printed on the upload screen in front of you. It is the only figure that applies to your application on the day you file, and it beats anything written on a page like this one.

Why an upload appears to work and does not

The failure people describe is rarely a crash. It is a document that seems to upload and is simply not in the list afterwards.

There are a few reasons this happens. Validation runs in the portal rather than on GOV.UK, so error handling varies from operator to operator and from release to release. A file that exceeds a limit may be dropped by the page’s own script before any request reaches a server, which produces no server error to report back to you. Sessions in these portals also time out, and an upload attempted against an expired session can fail without a useful message.

None of that is diagnosable from your side, which is why the fix is procedural rather than technical. Confirm attachment rather than assuming it.

Confirm it properly

After every upload, look at the list of documents in the portal and check the file is present under the name you gave it. Then sign out, sign back in, and look again. A file that survives a fresh session is genuinely stored.

Do this the day before your appointment as well, not only at the moment of upload. The list the portal shows you is what the caseworker will see.

Getting a file small enough

Scanning is what makes these files large. A scan is a photograph of a page, and colour at high resolution multiplies the size of every page. Scanning in greyscale, at a moderate resolution, keeps a bank statement legible and small. Photos taken with a phone benefit from cropping to the document, because the surrounding table adds size and nothing else.

For files that already exist, splitting a long bundle into single documents is usually better than compressing one large one, since each file is measured separately and a caseworker can find things. Our split PDF and compress PDF tools both run inside your browser, which is the relevant point for a folder containing passports, payslips and bank statements. Immigration evidence is the last category of document that should be uploaded to an unknown converter on the way to a government portal.

Whatever you compress, open it afterwards and read the smallest print. A statement whose figures have gone soft is a weaker piece of evidence than a large clean one.

We are not lawyers

FileGizmo builds file tools. We are not immigration advisers, this is not legal advice, and nothing here replaces the guidance for your specific route or advice from a regulated adviser. Every official figure above is linked to the GOV.UK page it came from so you can confirm it yourself.

The quick version

Evidence goes to a commercial partner, not to GOV.UK, so the limit that matters is the one on your upload screen. GOV.UK publishes 6MB per document for the EU Settlement Scheme, and 50KB to 6MB for the digital photo. Scan in greyscale, split rather than merge, and treat the portal’s document list as the only proof anything attached.