Drop your photo (or your passport bio-page shot), get a JPEG comfortably under the Hayya portal’s 2 MB cap at the best quality that fits. Everything runs in your browser — the file never leaves your device.
Qatar's visas run through the government's Hayya platform (hayya.qa) — the Tourist Visa (A1), GCC Resident Visa (A2), Visa with ETA (A3), GCC-companion visa (A4) and the US-citizen visa-free entry (F1) all use the same application flow, and it asks for two image uploads: a personal photo and your passport front page. The portal's own upload validation publishes exactly these rules: “Only image files (.jpg or .jpeg) are allowed. Max file size should be 2MB” — the same limits for both uploads, with “please upload a file less than 2MB” as the enforcement message. No PNG, no HEIC, no PDF for these two (the proof-of-accommodation slot, by contrast, wants PDF only, also 2 MB). This page presets a 1.9 MB target so the output is under 2 MB in every way a computer might count megabytes, and comes out as JPEG. There is no published minimum, so nothing ever needs padding.
Hayya runs an automated face check on the photo before a human ever sees the application. The portal's own error strings spell out what it tests: “Face not detected in the photo”, “More than one face detected on the photo”, “Do not turn the head as it must be centered”, even “The hairstyle is covering the right eye” — plus a general demand for a clear image. So: one person in frame, head straight and centered, both eyes visible, sharp and well-lit. And one rule people miss: the portal asks you to “upload a photo that has the closest likeness with the photo in your passport” — if your look has changed drastically since your passport photo, expect friction. Compressing to fit the 2 MB cap is exactly where quality matters: over-compress and the face check's clear-image test is what rejects you. PixFit binary-searches the encoder for the best quality that still fits, keeping full resolution whenever it fits.
Search results for this spec are a museum of confident, mutually contradictory numbers: 30×40 mm on one site, 35×45 mm on another, 38×48 mm on a third; “720×961 pixels”, “898×1134 pixels at 600 DPI”, “minimum 720 px”; white background here, blue background there. Three different paper sizes and two background colours across the top results is the tell: none of it comes from the portal. Hayya's public FAQ says only that the photo “should meet the standard requirements set by the immigration authorities, including dimensions, background, colour, and facial expression” — without publishing numbers — and the detailed upload instructions live inside the application flow itself. So this page deliberately presets no exact dimensions: a normal passport-style portrait on a plain light background satisfies the automated checks, and if the upload screen in front of you states specific numbers, the portal wins.
Your passport upload isn't just filed away: Hayya extracts your details from the image automatically, and its error for a bad shot is “Unable to extract data from the uploaded image. Please upload another image”. That means the two machine-readable lines at the bottom of the bio page must stay sharp and glare-free after compression. Photograph the page flat, fill the frame with it, don't crop the edges away to save bytes — and if it still reads soft under 2 MB, re-shoot closer rather than compressing harder. A phone shot of a passport page is detail-dense and often lands over 2 MB straight off the camera; drop it here the same way.
The official application site is hayya.qa (with its official FAQ); iPhone photos saved as HEIC can be dropped straight into PixFit and come out as portal-ready JPEGs. A visa photo travels with your passport details, so it shouldn't detour through a resizer's server: PixFit re-encodes entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and the re-encode strips EXIF metadata (including GPS) as a side effect. For nearby formats, see the Saudi eVisa and Oman eVisa pages, or the full verified table.