How did you upload "additional info" letters?

Happy to help and now I may know a little something for my next freak-out in 2.5 years! 😂 and thanks for the insight @Jon56  I’m sure all will go well. Good luck

All did go well! Her visa has been approved and we can finally plan our lives without worry.

3 things that I noticed from my experience over the last 2 days:

1. At the visa centre building, we were fully expecting it to be applicants only allowed inside. The door even had an "applicants only" sign on it. My wife went in and asked if I was allowed to sit and wait with her and they almost encouraged it which was really nice. Beats having to sit in my car for 25 minutes and I got to see exactly what a biometrics kiosk looks like, so that was interesting.

2. At the appointment, we had a 10:30 slot but a few other people did as well, so it went by who arrived first. There was also a gentleman whose slot was 10am who hadn't checked in, but they still saw him despite being 30-35 minutes late. Wouldn't recommend it of course, but they had no issues with it.

3. We paid the extra £1.25 or whatever it was for SMS updates. We received a text the day before the appointment reminding us of it and we also received a text when the visa centre had sent the details to the Home Office to review. Our appointment was at 10:30am, we received the text at 6:05pm so it wasn't sent until the end of the day. I was worried we'd have to wait most of the day to get our confirmation because of this, but the email came through at 8:43am this morning and everything has been wonderful since.

Sorry for overtaking the thread a bit here! Hopefully someone can find some worth in the information above.

All did go well! Her visa has been approved and we can finally plan our lives without worry.

Congratulations! 

All did go well! Her visa has been approved and we can finally plan our lives without worry.

3 things that I noticed from my experience over the last 2 days:

1. At the visa centre building, we were fully expecting it to be applicants only allowed inside. The door even had an "applicants only" sign on it. My wife went in and asked if I was allowed to sit and wait with her and they almost encouraged it which was really nice. Beats having to sit in my car for 25 minutes and I got to see exactly what a biometrics kiosk looks like, so that was interesting.

2. At the appointment, we had a 10:30 slot but a few other people did as well, so it went by who arrived first. There was also a gentleman whose slot was 10am who hadn't checked in, but they still saw him despite being 30-35 minutes late. Wouldn't recommend it of course, but they had no issues with it.

3. We paid the extra £1.25 or whatever it was for SMS updates. We received a text the day before the appointment reminding us of it and we also received a text when the visa centre had sent the details to the Home Office to review. Our appointment was at 10:30am, we received the text at 6:05pm so it wasn't sent until the end of the day. I was worried we'd have to wait most of the day to get our confirmation because of this, but the email came through at 8:43am this morning and everything has been wonderful since.

Sorry for overtaking the thread a bit here! Hopefully someone can find some worth in the information above.

Awesome news ! Thanks for the update. I’m going Monday. I heard from someone else to arrive early too on the forum . Glad you are worry free!

Awesome news ! Thanks for the update. I’m going Monday. I heard from someone else to arrive early too on the forum . Glad you are worry free!

In Edinburgh, 2 people's showed up HOURS before their appointment and they took them in early.

There was a lady sitting in the waiting room (after I was finished) there for a naturalisation appointment and she had her husband and non service dog with her. I know it wasn't a service dog because it lunged for me and barked at me.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

"To help contain the files size to 6MB please scan in ‘Greyscale’ or ‘Black and white’ and not in ‘Colour’. It is also helpful to keep the resolution between 150 dpi (dots per inch) to 300 dpi. This can be achieved by configuring your device by the available ‘Settings’ option, that allows you to choose the file format, colour and the dpi resolution. With this approach, you will be able to scan up to 50 pages per document within the allowed 6 MB limit."

Soooo....is this mandatory? Cause I scanned all my documents in before submitting and I did it all as is (meaning, color) and for things like my passport, used higher resolution dpi. None of them are even 1 mb. Has anyone done theirs in color or should I rescan everything?

Confused as well but I thought I’d let you know what the categories are as I’m doing this today.

There is no guidance once you open the categories except in the mandatory ones (and even that guidance seems lacking)

I’ll tell you my plan of how I’m doing it but it could be wrong.

“Mandatory documents for <<applicant name here>>”

Document type
- Proof of Identity / Travel History
(Once you open that tab, mine says “Evidence of <sponsor name> immigration status in the UK, The Biometric residence permit for <<my name>>

Here I put my BRP, all and my husbands passport pic page of his UK passport

Next under mandatory is has
Proof of Application
Says
“The passport issued by the USA for Mrs JMH (me) , Declaration signed by spouse or civil partner Your partner should download, sign and return the following Declaration: Your partners relationship Declaration for married partners and civil partners

Will put the Optional Documents categories in next post

Sooo....on my upload page, the ONLY thing that is listed under "mandatory documents" is "Proof of application" which wants my passport and my sponsor's declaration. The travel history/proof of identity bit is under "optional" and it gives no mention of what to put in it. In fact, NONE of the others do. What have other ppl seen?

sooooo.....it is physically impossible to scan my passport in under 6mb. my passport has 52 pages. my old passport, that has the normal number of pages, barely makes it under 6 mb at 100 dpi.
Any ideas?

sooooo.....it is physically impossible to scan my passport in under 6mb. my passport has 52 pages. my old passport, that has the normal number of pages, barely makes it under 6 mb at 100 dpi.
Any ideas?

Make files- Applicant's  Passport 1 of 2 and Applicant's Passport 2 of 2.

Make files- Applicant's  Passport 1 of 2 and Applicant's Passport 2 of 2.

Yea, I was thinking that too. Right now, I'm trying to do it at 100 DPI and cropping the space around as much as possible just to see if it comes in under 6mb. Although so far my entry clearance vignette's smallest letters are a little fuzzy doing that :-(

Yea, I was thinking that too. Right now, I'm trying to do it at 100 DPI and cropping the space around as much as possible just to see if it comes in under 6mb. Although so far my entry clearance vignette's smallest letters are a little fuzzy doing that :-(

Things do need to be legible.

Things do need to be legible.

I managed to get it in at 5.5mb. The bit that is a little fuzzy is the tiny print that says things like "place of issue". Its legible...just tiniest bit fuzzy.

meh....i've just compared it to the original color scan i did when i made the vignette page 600 dpi...and its exactly the same. so i'm not gonna worry about it. but thanks guys.
i still can't believe i have to re-scan these.....and just found a few more. over half are fine for size....they are just in color. not sure if i should just re-scan everything

After reading the document sections for uploading from Jess, I can confirm it's exactly the same for ILR. My wife's appointment is tomorrow morning which I'm driving her to and I've been in charge of making sure all the documents are up and ready. I'm super stressed that I've missed something, but hopefully within 48 hours we'll have our good news.

When uploading documents, there are guidelines on what you should name the file (for example "Bank-Statement-Apr-2019.pdf") and if you've made a mistake (either a typo or you selected the wrong file) then you can remove it and upload the correct file. The uploading portion definitely takes place after submitting your application; there's no way to upload until you have.

When it came to booking the appointment, we submitted the application on Dec 14th and we selected the first available free appointment at the nearest centre (Birmingham) so roughly 3 and a half weeks between booking it and attending it.

If anything sticks out after our appointment that isn't obvious, I'll post back here to hopefully help someone else out.

Out of curiosity, did you also put the payslips and bank statements under "finances"?

I have written a cover letter and listed what was uploaded to each category. Under "finances" I wrote, "9 most recent monthly payslips for Sponsor's employment."
 And when uploading them, I have named them all as "sponsor's payslips". But now I am not sure if I should have put the payslips under "sponsors/employment."

Im wondering what successful people have done.

This really is such a sh*t system

Just curious what successful people have done.

Out of curiosity, did you also put the payslips and bank statements under "finances"?

I have written a cover letter and listed what was uploaded to each category. Under "finances" I wrote, "9 most recent monthly payslips for Sponsor's employment."
 And when uploading them, I have named them all as "sponsor's payslips". But now I am not sure if I should have put the payslips under "sponsors/employment."

Im wondering what successful people have done.

This really is such a sh*t system

Just curious what successful people have done.

Oh I’m sorry I didn’t see your thread here last nite. Hope you are sorted. I did mine in colour but used the scanner at work and then converted them all to PDF which somehow kept them all quite small. My passport had way less than 52 pages though!!

I kept payslips and bank statements together bc I labelled them to correspond to one another so figured it would be easier to check payslips to them. I hope it doesn’t matter - they give no instruction so I think as long as it’s there, you should be ok...but you know I’m not a “successful” person (yet 🤞🏻)!

Oh I’m sorry I didn’t see your thread here last nite. Hope you are sorted. I did mine in colour but used the scanner at work and then converted them all to PDF which somehow kept them all quite small. My passport had way less than 52 pages though!!

I kept payslips and bank statements together bc I labelled them to correspond to one another so figured it would be easier to check payslips to them. I hope it doesn’t matter - they give no instruction so I think as long as it’s there, you should be ok...but you know I’m not a “successful” person (yet 🤞🏻)!

Fingers crossed they don't deny based on putting things in wrong folders when they themselves haven't given any guidance to it. I might take a screen shot to prove that.
Any who. Thanks for the info. Ive got everything uploaded now. Think I'm just gonna have one last look to make sure everything is definitely there and then leave it. Appt is on Thursday.
I will say, there was ONE helpful thing about the website....it let's you preview the file after uploading it to verify it. I caught out a potentially fatal issue for that. I saved my explanation letter as a PDF thinking it would save me scanning....but when I checked all the pages on the preview, the last two were corrupted. Had to print out and scan in to get a file that would work.