Terrible quality photo in edu verification, no matter what I do (iPhone 13 pro)

[phyturge]

Hi everyone,

hundreds of posts like this, don't know how to reach out, but:

it's my tenth application, all rejected. 1st reason I guess: I'm on Erasmus exchange, so can't prove location. I started to apply as student of Venice Conservatory, who formally I am for this semester, to solve this - and attach both venetian and my country student IDs.

I think even this approach isn't worth my effort, as no matter what I do, when I take a photo quality is fine (iPhone 13 pro), but after photo is taken I see sth like attached below. if it's what's seen in review, it's unreadable.

what can I do in such a case? don't have anything better to prove my status than ID. tried with close up of ma national ID, quality is not much better, but then I'm rejected because of a location.

should I buy pro account just to reach the customer service? I could send quality photos by e-mail, other documents, reference from my dean, anything - but not in this abstract pixelize-mode-rectangle I have in the browser.

any help will be much appreciated.

PS: yup, checked billing ID, used academic e-mails, tried to send other documents but have nothing as solid as ID.

[Archit086]

You’re not doing anything wrong here. This is a known pain point with GitHub’s student verification, especially for people on exchange programs. The system is very rigid. It heavily relies on location signals and automated image checks, so being on Erasmus already puts you at a disadvantage because your documents don’t line up cleanly with one country. The image issue you’re describing is also real — the upload flow aggressively compresses or downsamples the photo, and if that’s what reviewers see, it can easily fail automated or manual checks even if the original photo was perfectly clear. Unfortunately, there’s no way to send higher-quality images through that form or bypass the location logic. Buying a Pro account won’t help either, since it doesn’t give you access to student verification support or manual review via email. The only things that sometimes work are using a clearly readable enrollment letter or official certificate in PDF form, issued by the host institution, or waiting until you’re back in your home country and reapplying then. It’s frustrating, but this isn’t about effort or photo quality on your side it’s the verification pipeline being overly strict and not designed well for exchange students.