Photos For Settlement Visa

[bryangiggs]

Hi All, we are just in the process of getting together everything for the Settlement Visa Application, My wife is leaving the UK to return to Thailand before her visit visa expires on the 14th Sept.

How do you think it is best to present photos with the application. We we thinking of printing some maybe 4 to an A4 sheet with some brief text underneath explaining whats what, attaching tickets, reciepts etc. with the rest of the photos supplied loose in the envelope they came in.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[tigerjohn]

i did ours just plain a4 print paper 4per page no text, just made sure date stamp was on camera, had no problems with them?

[phomthai]

We are planning on doing any supporting letters, proof of address stuff (incl photos of our home & car), trips taken together etc in Word with pictures & scans in the Word documents. Will also get friends & family letters, invites etc emailed with any supporting photos & print off along with details of any internet booked flights

Would expect this to include at least 20 photos. Will then add a cd with the application with a lot more photos on it, whether they chose to look at it or not is up to them but you've supplied the evidence!

The advantage of the cd is that it will have the time & date details relating to each photo & you can group in to relevant folders, eg 2007 Patong Xmas, 2009 BKK June, 2010 London May etc. Personally I hate having a date stamp on my photos so always have this mode switched off...Make reference to the cd (include screen dump of "My computer" showing relevant folders) in your covering letter just in case our friends at the VFS office say "No can not do...." so at least embassy know you tried to include additional evidence!

Try to keep all paperwork A4 based wherever possible, cellotape boarding passes etc onto plain A4 paper, less likely to lose, a lot easier to collate & reference & hence easier for you AND them to review..

My basic rules are:

1. Take your time collating the evidence
2. Be organised
3. Make it easier for them to review
4. Don't give them an excuse to say no!

Hope this helps, keep us posted on what you do & how you get on. Cheers

[Mercury]

Though we have yet to receive a reply at 9 weeks and counting, all our photographic evidence, over numerous years, was presented as colour photos on A4 paper with very brief commentary such as "Christmas 2006 at home in Bangkok". We put about 6 photos on each page (you can move the margins to accommodate larger photos and resize photos simply by dragging them) in a MS Word document. They were printed out in colour on a laser printer (don't use an ink jet). It was also a simple exercise to include a copy. In fact, we included copies of everything, clearly identifying which was the original and which was the copy.

Good advice on planning and taking your time. We have thousands of photos and picking perhaps 20 pages and around 100 photos over many years was our decision. 100 photos of last week in a bar in Phuket is not what it is about, rather 20 photos over 2 years. They are not looking for your photography skills but merely ascertaining the depth and length of your relationship. For that, printed on paper seems to easily qualify and successful applicants can attest to that.

[Guest jonzboy]

there are no rules about photos, a sadly lacking aspect of the UKBA website, but my experience is as follows

don't put loose photos in an envelope

I had 4x6 prints which i glued to A4 sheets, 1 to 3 each page, with printed captions about date and location, and each page headed with applicant's name

I didn't bother with copies, just told them on the photo section front page they could keep them if they wanted, which they did

I was proving a relationship that had existed for ten years, so picked out photos scanning those years, one or two for each year, also picking different themes, on holiday in France, at home with my folks in UK, or overseas with hers

don't put the sheets of mounted photos in a folder, they'll ask you to remove them from the folder, best advice is to group such pages together and attach with what I call an "indian tag", a short piece of string with a brass bar at each end which goes through a hole punched at one corner

my brother has successfully done the fiance visa two years back and recently the ILR for his wife and he printed out his photos onto A4 paper with a cheap inkjet printer