We checked four authorities for this page. They want four different things, and one of them does not want a photograph file at all. Passport: 630 × 810 pixels, white background, face 80–85% of the frame, glasses off. The guidance states no file size at all, so neither do we. UPSC: JPG or JPEG, 20–300 KB, between 350×350 and 1000×1000 pixels — and the photo ID in PDF only. Also: once you press confirm, it cannot be changed. SSC: the photograph is taken live by the camera, not uploaded. People are still resizing files to 20 KB for a form that will never accept one. The signature is 10–20 KB, about 6.0 × 2.0 cm. Court e-filing is another world entirely: searchable PDF or PDF/A, 300 DPI, everything merged into one OCR file, bookmarked to the Master Index, 100 MB High Court and 20 MB District — and a file name of no more than 45 characters. So the only number that governs your application is the one printed on your screen. Every figure above carries an October 2026 date, and we say so again at the bottom.
What size should the photo be? It is asked at every cyber cafe, every photocopy shop and every kitchen table where somebody is filling a form for a child, and it is asked in the expectation of a number.
The expectation is reasonable. Every other measurement in life has an answer: a passport photograph at a studio, a sheet of paper, a railway ticket. Why should a file be different?
But the question as asked has no answer, and the attempt to answer it anyway is what causes almost all the trouble in this area. Somebody supplies a number from a form they filled last year, it gets applied to a different form, and an application is refused for a reason nobody understands.
The honest reframe. The useful question is not what size should it be but what does this form say it should be. Those sound like the same question. The first has no answer and the second always does.
It is also worth saying what this page is not. It is not a list of sizes for every portal in India, and the section at the end explains why we refused to build one. It is four verified examples, the differences between them, and the habit that makes the question answerable on any form you ever meet.
There is no central authority setting upload limits for Indian application portals, and there is no reason there would be. Each portal was built by a different body at a different time for a different purpose, and each set its limits against its own storage, its own bandwidth and its own verification process.
A recruitment commission processing crores of applications in a fortnight has different constraints from a passport system matching a face against an international standard, and both have different constraints from a court that has to keep a filing readable for decades.
So the limits are not arbitrary, but they are local. Each one makes sense inside its own system and none of them was meant to travel.
We checked four for this page, going to the published material of the authority that would actually reject the file. Here is what they ask for, side by side, which is the quickest possible demonstration of why a single number cannot exist.
| Authority | Photograph | Signature |
|---|---|---|
| Passport applications | 630 × 810 pixels, colour, white background, face 80–85% of frame. No file size or format stated | Not stated in the guidance read |
| Union Public Service Commission | JPG/JPEG, 20–300 KB, 350×350 to 1000×1000 pixels | Same format and limits; white paper, black ink preferred |
| Staff Selection Commission | Captured live by camera — not an upload, so no file size exists | JPEG/JPG, 10–20 KB, about 6.0 × 2.0 cm |
| National Testing Agency (bulletin read) | JPG, 10–200 KB, 80% face, both ears visible, no spectacles | JPG/JPEG, 10–30 KB |
Look along the photograph column. One wants pixels and no file size. One wants both. One wants neither because it takes the picture itself. One wants a file size and did not state pixels at all. A number that satisfies any one of them is wrong for at least two of the others.
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The second reason there is no standard answer is that the answers move, and they move at very different speeds.
Court filing rules are published as rules by a court. They change rarely and they change by notification, which means a rule you learn stays useful for years. Examination specifications are published in a bulletin issued for each examination, which means a figure that was right for one session may not be right for the next one.
That difference in speed is worth internalising, because it tells you how much trust to place in anything you remember. A court rule you learned two years ago is probably still correct. An examination size you learned two years ago is a guess.
Student applications are where this bites hardest, because a single admission season can involve a scholarship portal, a university portal and an examination portal, each with its own slots and its own numbers. Our pages on scholarship documentation and college admission documentation deal with the applications themselves; this one deals with the files they refuse.
On the form. Almost without exception, the specification is printed on or linked from the very page that has the upload button on it.
It appears in one of four places, and it is worth knowing all four because portals differ in which they use. Beside the upload control itself, in small text. Behind a link marked instructions, guidelines or a question mark. In the instruction booklet or information bulletin that the application was advertised with. Or in the notice that opened the recruitment or the examination.
It is very rarely genuinely unpublished. When somebody cannot find it, nine times out of ten they have not looked behind the small link, because the small link looks like decoration.
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There is a quieter cost too. A family that has been refused three times stops believing the portal is usable and starts looking for somebody to pay, which is how a free registration turns into a charged one. Half the value of knowing where the specification lives is not needing anybody.
It is worth being concrete about why any of this matters, because resizing a photograph sounds like the least consequential task in an application.
Sometimes a rejected upload costs ten minutes. Sometimes it costs the application: a form that closed, a fee that is not refunded, an examination cycle that comes round next year. And in one case we found on this page, it costs something that cannot be fixed at all — the published answers of one Commission state that once the confirm step is taken, the photograph and signature cannot be changed.
So the attention is not proportionate to the difficulty of the task. It is proportionate to what happens if it is wrong.
This service covers two things that are usually confused, and separating them explains most of what follows.
The portal copy. Taking a photograph, a signature or a document and producing a version that satisfies a stated format, size and dimension. Small, disposable, made for one submission.
The filing set. Taking a body of documents and producing what a court’s rules require: searchable text, a stated resolution, everything merged into one file, bookmarked to an index, named within a character limit. Not smaller, necessarily. Correctly formed.
The first is a five-minute job that goes wrong because of a number. The second is a careful job that goes wrong because nobody knew the rules existed. Our PDF legal formatting page deals with the document’s own layout under those same rules, and our digitisation page deals with building the archive the copies are derived from.
These two words get used interchangeably and they describe different operations with different consequences. Most failed uploads come from doing one when the form wanted the other.
Resizing changes the dimensions. Fewer pixels across and down, or a smaller page. The image gets physically smaller and the file gets smaller as a side effect.
Compressing keeps the dimensions and throws away quality to reduce the bytes. The image stays the same size on screen and gets worse to look at.
Why this matters practically. If a form asks for 350 by 350 pixels, no amount of compression will satisfy it — you need to resize. If a form asks for under 200 KB and your dimensions are already right, resizing will break the dimensions — you need to compress. Doing the wrong one produces a file that fails for a reason the error message will not explain.
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One more distinction before the specifications. A portal copy and a verified copy are different things, and people conflate them. Making a file small enough to upload says nothing about whether the document in it is genuine or current; that is a separate check, and our digital document verification page covers it. A perfectly sized upload of an expired certificate is a perfectly sized failure.
A few more words are worth pinning down, because portals use them loosely and people guess.
| Word | What it actually means here |
|---|---|
| Size | Usually the file size in KB, but sometimes the physical dimensions. Where a form says size in centimetres it means dimensions; where it says KB it means bytes |
| Resolution | Dots per inch, which matters when scanning paper and means very little for a photograph taken on a phone |
| Format | JPG, JPEG, PDF. JPG and JPEG are the same thing with different spellings; PDF is not interchangeable with either |
| Searchable | That the text in the file can be selected and found, as opposed to being a picture of text. A court requirement, not an aesthetic one |
| PDF/A | A version of PDF designed for long-term archiving. Named expressly in the court rules below as the preferred format |
The one that catches people most often is the first. A form saying the signature should be 6.0 by 2.0 centimetres and 10 to 20 KB is stating two different requirements, and satisfying one of them is half the job.
The guidance published for passport applications follows the international civil aviation standard, which is why it is stated in pixels rather than kilobytes: the photograph has to work for machine matching rather than merely look like the applicant.
What it states is that the photograph should be in colour with dimensions of 630 by 810 pixels. That is a portrait shape, taller than it is wide, and it is the first thing people get wrong because phone photographs are usually the other way round.
Guidelines for photographs compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organization standard, published for passport applications. The photograph should be in colour with dimensions of 630 by 810 pixels. The background of the photograph should be white. It should be a close up of the head and the top of the shoulders such that the face takes up 80 to 85 per cent of the photograph. The expression on the face should look natural. Glasses are to be taken off to avoid reflections. Head coverings are not permitted except for religious reasons.
That guidance does not state a file format, a file size limit or a resolution in dots per inch. We therefore state none, and anybody quoting one for this purpose is quoting it from somewhere else.
Note the shape of that gap. It is not that the requirement is secret; it is that this particular authority specifies the picture and not the file. Which is itself worth knowing, because a person hunting for a kilobyte figure here will hunt forever.
Where the application is a passport one, the photograph is only part of what is wanted and the supporting papers have their own requirements. Our passport affidavit page deals with the annexures that accompany those applications, which are a drafting question rather than a file one.
Three of those requirements are about the photograph as a photograph rather than as a file, and all three are ignored constantly.
The face at 80 to 85 per cent of the frame. This is far closer than people take. A photograph with the shoulders and a bit of room is wrong; it wants the head and the top of the shoulders filling the picture.
A white background. Not a light wall, not a cream wall, not a wall with a switchboard on it. If the only available wall is coloured, that is worth solving before the photograph is taken rather than afterwards.
Glasses off. The stated reason is reflections, and it is a real one; a flash on a lens hides an eye and an eye that cannot be seen cannot be matched. People who wear spectacles permanently find this odd, and it is not negotiable.
Head coverings are permitted for religious reasons and not otherwise. The sensible reading is that the face must remain fully visible within the covering, which is what every other part of the guidance is driving at.
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The Union Public Service Commission publishes its upload requirements in its own answers to candidate questions, and they are unusually complete: format, file size at both ends, and a dimension range.
Union Public Service Commission, published answers to candidate questions. The images of photograph and signature should be scanned in the JPG or JPEG format. The file should not exceed 300 KB and must not be less than 20 KB in size. The dimensions are 350 pixels wide by 350 pixels high minimum and 1000 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high maximum. The signature should be signed on white paper, preferably with a black ink pen, for better visibility. If the quality of the photograph or signature is poor, the application is liable to be rejected.
Two things in that are worth dwelling on. The first is the lower limit: not less than 20 KB. People shrink files obsessively and a file that is too small will be refused, which produces the baffling experience of being told a file is too small immediately after being told to make it smaller.
The second is the dimension range being square. Minimum 350 by 350, maximum 1000 by 1000. A photograph in the passport shape described above is not square, so a file prepared for one of these authorities is wrong for the other even before the kilobytes are considered.
Alongside the photograph and the signature there is a third upload, and it has a different format requirement that catches people out. The Commission states that a photo identity document must be in PDF format only, within the same size limits of not more than 300 KB and not less than 20 KB.
PDF only. Not a JPG of the identity card. That is one form, three uploads, and two different formats among them — which is the clearest possible illustration of why a single number per form is not enough and the specification has to be read item by item.
If the document in hand is a photograph of a card, it has to be converted rather than resized, and converted properly rather than by printing and scanning. Our document verification step catches the related problem, which is an identity document that is legible but does not match the name on the application.
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This is the most consequential single sentence we found while preparing this page, and it deserves its own section.
The Commission’s own answers state that once the confirm upload button is clicked, the system does not allow changes to the photograph or signature.
Read that as an instruction about pace rather than about files. Everything else on this page can be redone. This cannot. So on this form the order of work is: prepare the files, open each one at full size and look at it, check it against the stated requirement a second time, and only then confirm. Twenty minutes of slowness against something that cannot be reversed is not caution, it is arithmetic.
The Commission also records a route for a document uploaded in error: that details may be updated with the same application reference during the correction window stated in the notification. So where something has gone wrong the first thing to establish is whether that window is open and when it closes, rather than concluding either that nothing can be done or that it can be fixed at leisure.
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The Staff Selection Commission states its signature requirement precisely, and it is the only requirement here that pins down both bytes and centimetres for a single item.
Staff Selection Commission, recruitment notice of 2026. The signature is to be scanned in JPEG or JPG format, with a file size of 10 to 20 KB and dimensions of about 6.0 centimetres in width by 2.0 centimetres in height. Inappropriate photographs or blurred or miniature signatures are rejected summarily.
Six centimetres by two is a wide, shallow shape, and it is the proportion that causes the difficulty. A signature scanned from the middle of a sheet of paper is usually taller and narrower than that, and cropping it to the right proportion without cutting into the signature itself takes a moment of care.
The word summarily in that notice is doing real work. It is not saying a poor signature will be queried; it is saying it will be dealt with without further process. A signature worth twenty kilobytes should not be the thing that ends an application.
Now the finding that makes this section worth reading even if you already knew everything above.
On the Commission’s own notice, the photograph in the online application module is captured live through the camera. It is not an upload of an existing file, and the notice records that the online photograph must not be a pre-existing one.
Which means there is no photograph file size for this form, and no file you prepare will be used. Every hour spent getting a photograph to twenty kilobytes for this module is an hour spent on something the form does not accept. We have met people who tried four times and concluded that their phone was the problem.
The notice also sets out what must not be worn while the photograph is taken: candidates should not wear a cap, a mask or spectacles, and the photograph should show a clear full frontal view. Since the picture is being taken rather than chosen, that is a thing to arrange before sitting down — a plain wall, decent light, spectacles off, and nothing on the head.
And the notice records a consequence: applications with photographs not in line with the instructions are liable to be rejected or cancelled.
There is a qualification to that consequence which we would not have expected and which matters to a great many candidates.
The notice records that the rejection consequence — both for photographs not in line with the instructions and for blurred or miniature signatures — does not apply to candidates who completed Aadhaar Based Authentication.
So the first question for anybody worried about a photograph already captured on that module is not about the photograph. It is whether Aadhaar based authentication was completed. If it was, the position is materially different from what the rest of the notice would suggest; if it was not, the warning applies in full.
And the general lesson, which is bigger than this form. Exemptions and provisos in a notice are where the useful answers live, and they are the first thing a summary drops. Anybody relying on a two-line version of a recruitment notice is relying on the version with the exceptions removed. Our Aadhaar update page covers getting that record into a state where authentication actually works.
The National Testing Agency conducts the examinations with the largest candidate numbers in the country, and it publishes its requirements in an information bulletin issued for each examination.
National Testing Agency information bulletin. The photograph is to be a scanned clear passport photograph in JPG format of a size between 10 KB and 200 KB, showing 80 per cent face without a mask, the complete face from chin to head, with straight eye contact, both ears visible, a light plain background and no sunglasses or spectacles. The signature is to be a scanned clear signature in JPG or JPEG format of a size between 10 KB and 30 KB. A category certificate is to be between 10 KB and 300 KB, as is a driving licence where applicable. No hard copies of certificates or mark sheets are required to be submitted along with the online application form, while candidates must be able to produce the documents for verification later.
That bulletin does not state pixel dimensions for the photograph or the signature, and none is given here.
And the caveat that governs this whole section: the Agency issues a bulletin for each examination. The figures above are those of the bulletin we read. For your own examination, the bulletin for that examination is the authority, and the useful habit is to open it rather than to trust a figure from a different one.
Two details in it are worth separate notice. Both ears visible is a composition requirement that no amount of file work will fix after the fact. And the certificate limits being different from the photograph limits is the same item-by-item point again: one form, several slots, several numbers.
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Court filing is a different regime and it is worth treating separately, because almost nothing from the sections above carries across. The requirements are not about being small. They are about being correctly formed, and they are published as rules.
The electronic filing rules of the High Court of Delhi, as corrected by a corrigendum of 4 April 2022, provide that documents should be converted to searchable Portable Document Format or PDF/A, and that PDF/A is the preferred format.
That single requirement defeats a large proportion of what people actually file. A scan of a printed page is a picture of text, not text; it looks perfect and satisfies none of this. PDF/A goes further still, being the variant designed so that a file opens the same way in twenty years, which is precisely what a court needs and precisely what nobody thinks about.
The rules are specific about how a scan becomes a compliant document. Text documents must be optical-character-recognition searchable, and scanned documents are to be saved in OCR searchable mode and saved as a PDF document. Text and scanned documents must then be merged into a single OCR searchable PDF.
Read the second half of that again, because it is the part that is routinely missed. Not a folder of files. Not a petition in one file and annexures in another. One file, searchable throughout, containing both the typed material and the scanned material.
Which is why this job is not a conversion. Merging typed and scanned material into one searchable file, in the right order, with the text layer actually working on the scanned pages, is a piece of work with several places to go wrong. Our file preparation page covers assembling the set that this process then turns into the filing.
For the scanning itself the rules specify an image resolution of 300 dots per inch for non-text documents.
Three hundred is the number worth remembering because it sits at a useful point: high enough that the optical character recognition works and that a stamp or an endorsement remains legible, low enough that a long filing does not become unmanageable. Scanning at less saves space and costs you the text layer; scanning at much more mostly produces a larger file with no benefit anybody will notice.
It is also the number that resolves the most common conflict in this work. When a court file is too large, the instinct is to scan at a lower resolution. The rules do not permit that, and the correct answer is elsewhere — in colour depth, in how the file is assembled, and in the end in the Designated Centre route described below.
The same rules govern the document before it becomes a file, which is why this service and the drafting service are usually wanted together.
| Requirement | What the rules state |
|---|---|
| Paper size | A-4, 29.7 cm by 21 cm |
| Margins | Top and bottom 2 cm; left and right 4 cm |
| Alignment | Justified |
| Typeface and size | Times New Roman, font size 14 |
| Line spacing | 1.5 |
| Quotations and indents | Font size 12, single spacing |
| Local language documents | A specified Unicode font at size 14, for trial court documents |
These are the kind of requirements that get treated as suggestions until something comes back. Our PDF legal formatting service exists for exactly this, and the honest position is that a filing which satisfies the file rules and breaks the layout rules is still a filing that may be returned.
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On size, the rules provide that the e-file limit is fixed at 100 MB for the High Court and 20 MB for District Courts, and that larger High Court files are to be filed through a Designated Centre.
Two things follow. The first is that the District Court limit is five times tighter than the High Court one, so a set prepared for one may not go into the other — and a matter that moves between them needs the question asked again.
The second is the Designated Centre, which is the part that stops people panicking. There is a published route for a filing that genuinely will not fit, and it is not compressing the evidence until it does. Where a set is too large, the answer is procedural rather than technical.
And the thing not to do. Do not reduce the scanning resolution below what the rules specify in order to meet the size limit. That breaks a stated requirement to satisfy another one, and it damages the readability of the very material being filed. The source we read also refers separately to a 50 MB limit for individual document uploads within the overall e-file limit, which is a second reason to ask rather than to assume one number covers everything.
There is a practical reason beyond compliance to do it properly. A bookmarked file is the one a registry clerk, a judge’s reader and opposing counsel can all navigate, and a filing that is easy to navigate gets read as it was intended to be read. The index is not administrative decoration; it is how the argument is found.
The rules require that documents be book-marked as per the Master Index, duly approved by the Registry.
This is the requirement that turns a merged file into a usable one, and it is the one most often absent. A single PDF of two hundred pages with no bookmarks is technically compliant with the format rules and practically unusable, and the rules do not leave it optional.
The sequence matters here and it catches people. The index has to exist and be approved, and the bookmarks follow it. Bookmarking first to whatever structure seemed sensible, and settling the index afterwards, means doing the bookmarks again.
Of all the requirements on this page, this is the one nobody has heard of until a filing comes back over it. The rules provide that file names must not exceed 45 characters, including spaces, that certain characters are prohibited, and that consecutive periods are not allowed.
Forty-five characters is shorter than it sounds. Petition under Section 9 with annexures final.pdf is already past it. And the way most people name a court file — party names, case description, date, the word final twice — blows through it comfortably.
The habit that solves it permanently. Decide a short naming scheme before preparing anything, and count the characters once. Something like a short matter code, an item number and two or three words is inside the limit every time, and it has the side benefit that the files sort themselves into the order of the index.
Where originals have to physically reach somebody before any of this can begin, that is its own arrangement rather than an afterthought, and our document pickup and delivery and doorstep documentation services exist because a set of papers that never leaves a cupboard cannot be prepared at all.
Finally the prohibitions, which are short and absolute. Under those rules filings must not be watermarked or encrypted, must be legible and free of markings, track changes or annotations, and must not contain malware.
Each of those is a real failure we see. A draft still carrying tracked changes from the last revision. A PDF with a firm’s watermark across every page. A document that opens only with a password somebody set two years ago and nobody remembers. Highlighting and sticky notes left on an annexure from when it was being read.
And the one with a trap in it. Where a document you hold is protected or watermarked, the answer is to obtain a clean copy from its source, not to strip the protection. We will not strip protection from a document we did not create, and a court filing is the last place to be explaining why you did.
The rules also deal with the signature, and the position is worth knowing: the PDF should be digitally signed by the party or advocate; where there is no digital signature, a printout must be physically signed, then scanned and uploaded; and Aadhaar based electronic signature may be used, with a one time password also available to District Court filers. Our digital signature certificate page covers obtaining one in your own name. Separately, the rules require that a statement of truth or affidavit bear the signature of the person concerned, and that signed and notarised or attested affidavits be kept as originals for at least two years after final disposal.
Everything in this work is downhill from the original. You can always make a good file smaller; you can never make a small file good.
So the first question on any job is what the best available version is, and the answer is often not the file somebody sends us. It is the photograph still on the phone before it was emailed. It is the certificate itself rather than a photocopy of it. It is the scan at full quality rather than the one that was already shrunk to send on a messaging app.
That last one deserves naming, because it is the commonest quality loss nobody notices. Sending a photograph through a messaging application usually compresses it on the way. The copy that arrives looks the same on a phone screen and has substantially less detail in it, and that is the copy that then gets prepared for a portal. Send the file as a document or an attachment, not as a picture in a chat.
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This is the one rule on this page that is not about any portal, and it is the one worth carrying into every other part of your records.
An upload limit is a rule about one box on one screen. A degree certificate, a title deed, a marriage certificate, a parent’s identity papers: those get opened again by people who are not you, years from now, for reasons nobody has thought of yet. Letting the first rule decide the quality of the second thing is a trade nobody would make if it were put to them in those words.
The discipline, in one line. Keep the good version untouched, build a throwaway copy for each form, and let the form never meet the good one. The copies are labelled for the job they do and deleted when it is done; the original is the only file in the folder that has to survive.
Our document digitisation page is built around that principle at the scale of a whole cupboard of papers, and the DigiLocker page covers keeping the official copies where an office will accept them. This page is the derive half of the same discipline.
One practical note on tools. Whatever you use, work on a copy and keep the original file open nowhere near it, because the commonest way an original is destroyed is a save where a save-as was intended. Name the working copy for the portal before you touch it, and the mistake becomes almost impossible.
Order matters, and getting it the wrong way round produces a worse file at exactly the same size.
Resize first, to the dimensions the form wants. Then, if the file is still over the limit, compress — and compress only as far as needed rather than as far as the tool will go.
Done the other way round you compress a large image, throwing detail away across all those pixels, and then discard most of the pixels anyway. The detail you paid for in the first step is gone and the result is visibly worse than it needed to be. This is the single most common reason a photograph comes out blotchy after somebody has made it smaller.
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There is one physical cause of a bad scan that no setting fixes, and it is worth naming because people are surprised by it: a laminated document. Lamination reflects whatever light the scanner or camera uses, and the reflection lands across the text. Our lamination page is about protecting a document for handling; if a document you need to upload has been laminated, expect to work harder on the capture, and avoid laminating anything you expect to scan repeatedly.
When a set of documents will not fit a limit, it helps to know where the weight actually is, because people reduce the wrong thing.
| What people blame | What usually matters more |
|---|---|
| The number of pages | Whether each page was scanned in full colour when greyscale would do |
| The resolution | Whether a photograph of a page was used instead of a scan, which is far larger for the same legibility |
| The format | Whether the same annexure has been included twice in the merged file, which happens more than you would think |
| The quality setting | Whether blank backs of pages were scanned and left in |
Work through that list before touching the resolution, especially on a court filing where the resolution is specified and the colour depth is not.
Identity documents are the exception worth remembering. A permanent account number card, an identity card with a hologram or a coloured emblem, a certificate with a seal: those carry meaning in the colour and should be captured in colour even though it costs size. Our PAN card page covers the application side where one has to be produced.
Colour depth is the lever most people never reach for and it is usually the right one.
A typed page scanned in full colour carries three channels of information to represent something that is black ink on white paper. The same page in greyscale is a fraction of the size and no less legible. Pure black-and-white is smaller still and is where care is needed, because it is the setting that makes a faint stamp, a pencil annotation or a light signature disappear entirely.
The working rule. Greyscale for typed pages. Colour only where colour carries meaning — a seal, a stamp, a photograph on a certificate, a coloured endorsement, anything where a verifier is looking at the colour itself. Avoid pure black-and-white on anything with a signature or a faint mark on it, because what it removes it removes completely.
Signatures suffer worse than anything else in this work, for a reason that is worth understanding rather than just working around.
A signature is thin dark lines on white. Compression works by smoothing areas that are nearly the same, which is exactly what the white around a thin line is. So a signature compressed hard does not get grainy the way a photograph does; the lines themselves get soft, grey and furry, and it stops looking like a signature.
That matters because the Staff Selection Commission notice says blurred signatures are rejected summarily, and the Union Public Service Commission says a poor quality image makes the application liable to be rejected. Both are describing exactly this failure.
Sign on white unlined paper, with a pen that puts down a solid dark line. The UPSC answers suggest a black ink pen for better visibility.
Scan rather than photograph it if there is any choice, because a photograph brings shadow and the shadow is what gets smoothed.
Crop to the proportion the form asks for — wide and shallow where a form specifies something like six by two centimetres — before reducing the file size, not after.
Check it at full size on a screen. If you would hesitate to call it your signature, a verifier will too.
This is the skill the rest of the page exists to hand over, and it takes two minutes.
Go to the upload page. Before clicking anything, look for the requirement in the four places it lives: beside the control in small text, behind a link marked instructions or guidelines or a question mark, in the instruction booklet or bulletin linked from the form, or in the notice the application was advertised with.
Then write down, for each upload slot separately: the format, the maximum size, the minimum size if one is stated, and any dimension requirement. Put today’s date beside it.
Four slots, four lines. A form with a photograph, a signature, a category certificate and an identity document may have four different format-and-size combinations, and the UPSC example above proves it: JPG for two of them and PDF for a third, on the same form. A single note saying photo 50 KB is how applications fail.
Three checks, in this order, before anything is uploaded. They take a minute and they catch nearly everything.
Open each file at full size. Not the thumbnail. A thumbnail of a ruined photograph looks fine, which is why people upload ruined photographs.
Check the orientation. Scanners and phones rotate things, and a document that opens sideways is a document a verifier will read as carelessness even where the rules say nothing about it.
Check the file against the note you wrote. Format, size, dimensions, slot. In that order, against the line you wrote for that slot rather than against your memory of the form.
And on a form where the upload cannot be reversed, do all three twice. The arithmetic on that was set out earlier and it does not change.
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Most of what reaches us traces back to this, which earns it first place among the failures.
Somebody searches for the size, finds a confident page, and resizes to that. The page was describing a different portal, or the same portal two years ago, or was copied from another page that was already wrong. There is an entire industry of sites publishing specification tables for Indian portals, and they are copied from one another rather than from the authorities.
This is why every figure on this page is attributed to the authority that would reject the file, and why we did not build a table covering every portal. Such a table would be wrong somewhere on the day it was published and wrong in more places every month after. Nobody can maintain it honestly, which is why the ones you will find are not maintained at all.
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Some forms require the candidate’s name and the date of the photograph printed across the bottom of the image. Some forms forbid any text on the photograph at all. Both requirements are real and they belong to different forms.
So this is a field where acting on a remembered rule is worse than doing nothing. A name printed on a photograph for a form that did not ask for it is an alteration to an identity image, and a photograph without one where it was required is simply non-compliant.
We do not add text to a photograph unless the form in front of us asks for it, and when we do we follow its wording about what the text should say and where it should sit. Neither of the four authorities we checked for this page required it, which is itself worth knowing.
The passport guidance wants a white background. The testing agency bulletin wants a light plain background. Those are composition requirements and no file work fixes them afterwards.
What goes wrong is ordinary: a cream wall with a shadow across it, a switchboard behind the shoulder, a curtain, a door frame cutting the corner, somebody else’s arm. On a phone screen at the moment of taking it, none of this registers.
Thirty seconds of preparation beats an hour of editing. Find the plainest light wall in the house, stand a little away from it so there is no hard shadow, face a window rather than a light, take spectacles off, take the cap off, and have somebody else hold the phone at eye level rather than above or below. Take five. Pick the one where the face fills the frame.
The underlying point is that three of these are composition rules rather than file rules, and that is the division worth holding on to throughout this page. A file rule can be satisfied after the photograph exists. A composition rule has to be satisfied while it is being taken, and no software fixes it afterwards.
Three of the four authorities we checked say something about this, and they agree.
The passport guidance says glasses are to be taken off to avoid reflections, and permits head coverings only for religious reasons. The Staff Selection Commission notice says candidates should not wear a cap, a mask or spectacles while the photograph is taken. The testing agency bulletin requires the face without a mask and no sunglasses or spectacles.
People who wear spectacles all day find this genuinely odd and sometimes resist it, and it is worth knowing it is not a quirk of one portal. The reason given is reflections, and the underlying purpose is that the eyes have to be visible for the face to be matched.
Where a form states a physical dimension for the signature, satisfying the file size while ignoring the proportion is half the job done, and it is the half that gets noticed.
A signature cropped from the middle of an A4 sheet comes out roughly square or taller than wide. A form asking for something around six centimetres by two wants a wide, shallow band. Squeezing a square image into that shape distorts the handwriting, and leaving it square means it does not match what was asked for.
The fix is at the signing stage rather than the editing stage: sign inside a box drawn to roughly the right proportion, so the crop is a crop rather than a transformation.
This is the failure that matters most on a court filing, and it is invisible to the person making it.
Somebody photographs a page with a phone, saves it as a PDF, and has a file that opens, looks like the document and is a picture. The court rules require searchable PDF or PDF/A with scanned material in OCR searchable mode. A photograph of a page satisfies none of that, and nothing about looking at it reveals the problem.
The ten-second test. Open the PDF and try to select a word with the cursor, or search for a word you can see on the page. If nothing selects and nothing is found, there is no text layer, and on a court filing that file is not compliant however clear it looks. A phone photograph has no text layer; our scanning work puts one in.
It is also the easiest thing on this page to fix and the easiest to miss, because the person who scanned it has been looking at the pages the right way up on paper the whole time. Rotate before merging, not after, or the bookmarks end up pointing at pages that then move.
Trivial, constant, and more damaging than it should be.
Documents arrive rotated, sideways, or with alternate pages upside down because they were fed through a scanner in two passes. The content is perfect. The reader has to turn their head or rotate every second page.
No rule we read prohibits it, which is exactly why it is worth being careful about. There is no error message and no rejection; there is just a verifier or a registry clerk forming a view about the care taken over the file. On a court filing that is not a view worth inviting.
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A related case: documents that have to leave the country. An apostille or an embassy attestation is done on an original or a properly certified copy, and a reduced digital version has no standing in that process at all. Our apostille page covers that route, and the reason it belongs here is that people sometimes prepare a portal copy expecting it to serve both purposes.
Under the court rules set out above, filings must not be watermarked or encrypted. In the portal world a protected file will usually simply fail to upload or fail to open on the other side.
Where this bites is on documents that came to you protected: a statement from an institution that opens with a password, a certificate issued with a watermark, a document from a professional carrying their own mark. Those are not yours to alter.
So the route is to go back to the source and ask for a clean copy, which institutions issue routinely when asked for one for filing. We will not strip protection from a document we did not create, and that is not squeamishness: a filing is the worst possible place to have to explain why a protected document arrived unprotected.
The last failure is the subtlest and it only arises where a digital signature is involved.
A file is digitally signed, and then somebody renames it, or opens and resaves it, or runs it through a compression tool to get it under a limit. Depending on what was done, the signature can be invalidated by the very step taken to make the file acceptable.
So on a signed filing the order is fixed and it is the opposite of the instinct: get the file to the required format, resolution, structure, size and name first, and sign last. The court rules impose a forty-five character name limit, and discovering that after signing means signing again.
The sequence for a signed court filing, in order. Assemble. Convert to searchable PDF or PDF/A. Merge into one file. Bookmark to the approved index. Name it inside the character limit. Check the size against the court’s limit. Then sign. Anything done after the signature risks the signature.
A related point on value, since the fee is small enough that it invites the question. The expensive thing in this area is never the file work; it is the submission that had to be made again, or the certificate that had to be obtained again because a name on it did not match. Where that is the real problem, our educational documents name correction page is the one to read instead of this one.
It is priced at ₹199 and done inside Same day. That makes it about the cheapest thing on this site and that is deliberate, because it is a small piece of work done carefully rather than a large one.
What you are paying for is somebody reading the specification off your actual form, producing files that satisfy it, and checking them before you upload. Not a conversion. A conversion is free and you can do it on your own phone.
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One thing that is not on that list: the physical document, in most cases. This is file work and it is done on what you send. Where the original genuinely has to be handled — because it needs scanning properly, or franking, or attestation — that is a different service and our franking and scanning pages cover those.
The best original you have. The sharpest scan, the biggest photograph, the actual document rather than a copy of a copy.
The portal or the form. Its name, or a screenshot of the upload page, or the link. Of everything on this list, this is what gets forgotten, and it is the only gap we cannot work round.
What each file is for. Photograph, signature, category certificate, annexure: the limits differ by item on the same form.
Any error message you have already seen. The exact words. Portals say unhelpful things, but they usually say which item failed.
What we do not need is a file you have already compressed to try and make it fit. That one is harder to work with than the original, for the reason the next section explains.
We also send back the note of the limits we worked to, with the date we read them. That is for your file rather than ours, and it is the thing that makes the second application on the same portal take five minutes.
A set of files named for what they are and where they go, each inside the stated limit, with the original left exactly as it was.
| What you get | Why it is like that |
|---|---|
| One file per upload slot on the form | Because the limits differ by slot, and a single file that satisfies one may fail another |
| Names that say what each file is for | So the right file reaches the right box at the moment of uploading, which is where mix-ups happen |
| The size of each file stated to you | So you can see it is inside the limit rather than take our word for it |
| Your originals, untouched | Because a portal copy is for one submission on one day and the original has to outlive it |
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We do not compress them, we do not overwrite them, and we do not hand them back smaller than they arrived. This is the one rule in this work that is not about portals at all.
Our guide to document digitisation argues the same thing from the archive end, and it belongs here too because this is where the damage actually gets done. One upload box, on one afternoon, sets a limit. A scan of a title deed has to answer a question somebody asks in 2050. Shrinking the second to please the first trades something permanent for something that expires the moment the form submits.
So the discipline is: keep the good one, derive the small one, treat the small one as disposable. If you take one habit from this page, take that one; it costs nothing and it is irreversible in the other direction.
Put a date, a name or a caption onto a photograph. Some forms ask for it and some forbid it. We follow the form, and we do not add it because somebody heard it was required.
Alter the content of a document to make it smaller. Cropping an annexure, dropping a page, removing a stamp from view: that is not compression, it is editing a document somebody will rely on.
Remove a watermark or a security setting from a document we did not create. Court rules bar encrypted and watermarked filings, but the answer to a protected document is to get a clean one from its source, not to strip it.
Make a photograph of somebody younger, thinner or lighter. Asked for more often than you would expect. The photograph is an identity document.
Sign anything. We prepare a signature image from a signature you have made. We do not produce one, and we do not place one on a document on your behalf.
Plainly: if you have one clear photograph, one portal, and its limit printed on the screen in front of you, do it yourself. Any phone can resize an image and any computer can make a PDF smaller, and there is no skill in this that justifies a fee for a single file.
This is worth paying for when the job is larger than it looks. A court filing that has to be one merged searchable file bookmarked to an index. Twenty annexures that together have to fit a cap. A photograph that keeps getting rejected and nobody can say why. A set of documents going to four different portals with four different rules.
And one case where it is worth it for a small job. When the upload cannot be undone. UPSC says in its own answers that once the confirm step is taken the system does not allow the photograph or signature to be changed. On a form like that, twenty minutes of somebody else checking is cheap insurance against a year.
That a portal will accept the file. We can make a file that satisfies every published requirement. Some portals reject for reasons they do not publish, and some reject for reasons that turn out to be a browser.
That a photograph will pass. Face proportion, background, expression and spectacles are judged. We can tell you when a photograph plainly fails a published rule; we cannot tell you how a verifier will see a borderline one.
Quality we were not given. A blurred original produces a smaller blurred file. Nothing adds detail that was never captured.
That the specification on this page is the one on your form today. It is dated, it came from the portal, and it may have changed since. The form governs.
A result on a form we cannot see. If the portal is behind a login we do not have, we work from your screenshot of the upload page, and the limits are whatever that screenshot says.
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Bring the error message, exactly as it appeared, and the file that was refused. Between those two the cause is usually findable in minutes.
The commonest causes, in the order we actually find them: the file was the right size but the wrong format; the dimensions were wrong while the size was fine; the file was fine and went into the wrong upload slot; the file had been compressed so hard it was rejected for quality rather than for size; or the portal wanted the item live from a camera and no file was going to satisfy it.
Note the last one, because it is the one nobody guesses. Where a form captures a photograph through the camera, as the Staff Selection Commission module does, no amount of resizing will help and the problem is not the file at all. Hours get spent on a file that was never going to be used.
It is worth saying that this habit costs nothing and is the only part of this page that compounds. Every form you fill after adopting it is easier, and every form you fill without it starts from nothing. People who keep this folder stop asking what the size is within about two applications.
Make a folder, one per application, and put three things in it: the originals, the portal copies, and a text note saying what the limits were and the date you read them.
The note is the part people skip and the part that pays. Applications come round again, forms get resubmitted, a correction window opens six weeks later, and the person who wrote down what the limits were is the person who does it in five minutes the second time. Scaled up to a whole matter, that is what our legal file management and file preparation services are.
We should be blunt about the shelf life of this page. Every specification set out above came from the portal’s own published material, read in October 2026. Portals revise these, and some revise them per examination session rather than per year.
So the numbers here are a worked illustration of what different portals ask for and how much they differ. They are not a reference table to be relied on without looking.
The rule that does not expire. Read the specification off the form you are filling, on the day you fill it, and write it down. Every number anybody gives you — including every number on this page — is a number from somewhere else, and the only one that governs your application is the one on your screen.
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Several, and it is worth saying which and why, because the gaps are deliberate rather than careless.
No single table of specifications for every Indian portal. Such a table would be wrong somewhere on the day it was published and wrong in more places every month after. Nobody can maintain it honestly, and the ones circulating are copied from each other.
No photograph size for the Staff Selection Commission online module, because on its own notice the photograph is captured live through the camera rather than uploaded, so a file size for it does not exist.
No pixel dimensions for the testing agency bulletins, because the bulletin we read gave file sizes and composition requirements and did not state dimensions.
No figures from any commercial file-conversion or form-filling website. There are a great many of them and they publish confident numbers. We take specifications from the authority that will reject the file, and from nowhere else.
No claim that one court’s e-filing rules apply to another court. The rules set out above are one High Court’s. Other courts publish their own, and the limits differ.
One section of this page is far more detailed than the rest, and the reason is worth stating. Court e-filing rules are published as rules, by a court, and they do not change per session the way an examination bulletin does. They are also the only specification on this page where getting it wrong has a consequence beyond resubmitting a form.
They are also the part of this subject where the gap between what people do and what is required is widest. A great many filings go in as flat scans with no searchable text, no bookmarks and names longer than the rules allow, and the person who prepared them had no idea that any of those were specified anywhere.
Our PDF legal formatting service deals with the drafting end of the same rules — paper size, font, margins and spacing in the document itself — and this one deals with the file. They are usually wanted together on a court file and ordering one without the other leaves half the rule satisfied.
Nor is a registration or an application itself our work merely because its files are. Where the underlying job is getting somebody onto a register or through an application, that sits on its own page — our e-Shram card page is one example, and worth noting here for a reason that belongs to this subject: at a service centre that registration needs no document upload at all.
Preparing files to a published specification is documentation, and that is the whole of what is described here.
What is not ours: deciding what should be filed, drafting it, settling an index, or anything addressed to a court. A filing that is technically perfect and substantively wrong is still wrong, and the substance belongs to whoever is conducting the matter.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Nor do we hold a digital signature on anybody’s behalf or sign a filing. Where a filing needs one, our digital signature certificate page covers obtaining it in your own name, which is the only way it should ever exist.
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If you are not filling a form today but you expect to, the single most useful thing is to get one good original photograph taken properly and stored somewhere you will find it. Every portal copy for the next two years comes off that one file, and taking it properly once is cheaper than taking it badly five times.
If you have a form open now, do these four things before you touch any file.
Find the specification on the page itself. It is usually beside the upload button, behind a small link, or in the instruction booklet linked from the form. It is almost always there.
Write it down, item by item, with today’s date beside it.
Check whether anything is captured live rather than uploaded. If it is, you need a camera and a plain wall, not a file.
Find out whether the upload can be changed later. If it cannot, slow down. That is the difference between this being a five-minute job and a one-chance job.
And one thing worth not keeping: the half-dozen intermediate attempts. A folder containing eight versions of the same photograph at different sizes, none of them named, is how the wrong one gets uploaded next time. Keep the original, keep the one that was accepted, delete the rest.
Keep the acknowledgement, keep the originals, and keep the portal copies for a few weeks. People delete the small files the moment the form submits, and then a correction window opens and everything is done again from scratch.
Keep the note of the limits too. Half the people reading this will fill a form for the same portal again, and the second time should take minutes.
Where the documents matter beyond the application — educational certificates, identity documents, property papers — the longer-term question is how they are stored rather than how they were shrunk, and our DigiLocker and digitisation pages deal with that.
If somebody at a shop tells you the size is such-and-such because that is what it always is, ask them which form they are describing. There is no such thing as the standard size, and the confident answer is usually a number from a different portal.
And the polite version to use on yourself. Before resizing anything, ask: where did this number come from? If the answer is not the form in front of me, read today, the number is a guess, and a guess here costs a submission.
Forward the best original you have together with the portal name or a screenshot of the upload page. You will get files that satisfy what that form actually asks for, with your originals returned untouched.
There is no standard size. There is only the form in front of you, the number printed on it, and a good original you should never overwrite to satisfy either.
This page is built on the published upload specifications of four separate authorities, read in October 2026, together with one High Court’s e-filing rules. Every figure is taken from the authority that would reject the file and from no other source.
On the passport photograph, the guidance for photographs compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organization standard published for passport applications states that the photograph should be in colour with dimensions of 630 by 810 pixels, that the background of the photograph should be white, that it should be a close up of the head and the top of the shoulders such that the face takes up 80 to 85 per cent of the photograph, that the expression on the face should look natural, that glasses are to be taken off to avoid reflections, and that head coverings are not permitted except for religious reasons. That guidance does not state a file format, a file size limit or a resolution, and none is stated here.
On the Union Public Service Commission, its published answers to candidate questions state that the images of photograph and signature should be scanned in the JPG or JPEG format; that the file should not exceed 300 KB and must not be less than 20 KB in size; that the dimensions are 350 pixels wide by 350 pixels high minimum and 1000 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high maximum; that the signature should be signed on white paper, preferably with a black ink pen, for better visibility; that a photo identity document must be in PDF format only, with the same size limits stated; that if the quality of the photograph or signature is poor the application is liable to be rejected; and that once the confirm upload step is taken the system does not allow changes to the photograph or signature.
On the Staff Selection Commission, a recruitment notice of 2026 states that the signature is to be scanned in JPEG or JPG format with a file size of 10 to 20 KB and dimensions of about 6.0 centimetres in width by 2.0 centimetres in height; that the photograph is captured live through the camera in the application module rather than uploaded as a pre-existing file; that candidates should not wear a cap, a mask or spectacles while the photograph is taken and that it should show a clear full frontal view; that applications with photographs not in line with the instructions are liable to be rejected or cancelled and that inappropriate photographs or blurred or miniature signatures are rejected summarily; and that those consequences do not apply to candidates who completed Aadhaar based authentication. Because the photograph is captured rather than uploaded, no photograph file size is stated for that module and none is given here.
On the National Testing Agency, the information bulletin read for this page states that the photograph is to be a scanned clear passport photograph in JPG format of a size between 10 KB and 200 KB showing 80 per cent face without a mask, the complete face from chin to head, with straight eye contact, both ears visible, a light plain background and no sunglasses or spectacles; that the signature is to be a scanned clear signature in JPG or JPEG format of a size between 10 KB and 30 KB; and that a category certificate is to be between 10 KB and 300 KB, as is a driving licence where applicable. It further records that no hard copies of certificates or mark sheets are required to be submitted with the online application form while candidates must be able to produce the documents for verification later. That bulletin does not state pixel dimensions, and the Agency publishes a bulletin for each examination, so these figures are those of the bulletin read rather than a standing specification.
On court e-filing, the electronic filing rules of the High Court of Delhi, as corrected by a corrigendum of 4 April 2022, provide that documents should be converted to searchable Portable Document Format or PDF/A, PDF/A being the preferred format (clause 6.2); that text documents must be optical-character-recognition searchable and that scanned documents are to be saved in OCR searchable mode and saved as a PDF document (clause 6.3), with text and scanned documents merged into a single OCR searchable PDF (clause 8.1); that non-text documents should be scanned at an image resolution of 300 dots per inch (clause 6.3); that typed documents use paper size A-4, 29.7 centimetres by 21 centimetres, with top and bottom margins of 2 centimetres and left and right margins of 4 centimetres, justified alignment, Times New Roman at font size 14 with 1.5 line spacing, and quotations and indents at font size 12 with single spacing (clause 6.1); that the e-file limit is fixed at 100 MB for the High Court and 20 MB for District Courts, larger High Court files being filed through a Designated Centre (clause 3.4); that documents must be book-marked as per the Master Index, duly approved by the Registry (clause 8.1 and Appendix V); that the PDF should be digitally signed by the party or advocate, that without a digital signature a printout must be physically signed, scanned and uploaded, and that Aadhaar based electronic signature may be used, with a one time password also available to District Court filers (clauses 7.1 to 7.3); that the statement of truth or affidavit must bear the signature of the person concerned and that signed and notarised or attested affidavits must be kept as originals for at least two years after final disposal (clauses 5 and 10.2); that file names must not exceed 45 characters including spaces, with certain characters prohibited and consecutive periods not allowed (clause 8.6); and that filings must not be watermarked or encrypted and must be legible and free of markings, track changes or annotations and must not contain malware (clause 8.7). Those are one High Court’s rules; other courts publish their own and the limits differ.
Four gaps on this page are deliberate. There is no consolidated table of specifications for Indian portals generally, no photograph file size for the Staff Selection Commission online module, no pixel dimensions for the testing agency bulletin, no figure taken from any commercial file-conversion or form-filling website, and no suggestion that one court’s e-filing rules govern filings in another. Every specification above is dated to October 2026 and the form being filled is the authority on the day it is filled.
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