Photo and signature size limits on Indian exam and bank forms, tested

The short answer: for the common bank-exam rule of a 20–50 KB photo at 200 × 230 pixels, resizing a photo to that size and saving it as a JPG at normal quality (85%) made a file under 20 KB for 43 of our 44 test photos. That's too small, and a compressor can't fix it, because compressors only make files smaller. Saving the same 200 × 230 photo at 99% quality put all 44 inside the range under both meanings of "KB". Signatures were harder: at 140 × 60 pixels, none of our 12 test signatures reached the 10 KB minimum at any quality, so you need more pixels than the "preferred" size if the form insists on 10 KB.

What the official notices ask for

We read the current notices and information bulletins on each body's own website and copied the limits as written. Most of them set a minimum as well as a maximum, which is unusual: passport and social media sites mostly set only a maximum.

Two things stand out. First, the bank recruiters (IBPS for its PO and RRB processes, and SBI) use exactly the same wording: 20–50 KB and 200 × 230 pixels for the photo, 10–20 KB and 140 × 60 pixels for the signature. The IBPS notice adds that "until photographs and signature are as per the specifications provided, the system will not allow the candidate to move forward". Second, none of these notices say whether a KB is 1,000 or 1,024 bytes. The spelling alone varies between "KB", "kb" and "kB".

We also tried to include UPSC, the Railway Recruitment Boards, the RBI and TNPSC. Their pages either didn't load from our test machine or showed a bot check instead of the PDF, so we left them out instead of quoting figures from coaching sites.

KB or KiB: where the line falls

A range like 20–50 KB has two edges, and each moves depending on how the site counts. Our KB vs KiB article explains the two definitions. For a minimum the larger, 1,024-byte figure is the safe one; for a maximum, the smaller 1,000-byte figure. That leaves these bands that pass either way:

Both edges came up in our tests. One phone photo saved at 200 × 230 and 99% quality came out at 50,308 bytes. That is 49.1 KiB, so a site that counts 1,024 bytes per KB accepts it, but it's 50.3 KB by the 1,000-byte count and a site that counts that way rejects it. Pixohub's own size readout counts in 1,024s too, so it shows that file as "49.1 KB": don't rely on a rounded label. At the other edge, 10 of our photo results landed between 20,000 and 20,479 bytes: over a 1,000-byte 20 KB minimum, under a 1,024-byte one.

The 20–50 KB photo at 200 × 230 pixels

We took 44 photos (20 iPhone photos and the 24 Kodak test images) and did what the bank notices suggest: crop and resize to 200 × 230 pixels, then make sure the file is no bigger than 50 KB. We used our resize tool with "Crop to fill", then fed the result to compress to 50 KB. Here is what each resize setting produced:

At the default 85%, the median photo was 12,758 bytes, well under the minimum. Only one photo, a detailed church interior, reached 20 KB at that setting. The compress-to-size page can't help here: a JPG that already fits is passed through untouched, which is right for a maximum but does nothing for a minimum.

Sending a larger file into the compressor didn't solve it either. From a PNG or a 100% JPG, the compressor re-encodes at the highest quality that fits, but it stops at 95%. At 200 × 230 pixels that usually lands at about 20–23 KB, so roughly half the budget goes unused and 16 to 19 photos still fell below 20,480 bytes. File size climbs steeply at the top of the quality scale: the median photo went from 12.8 KB at 85% to about 26 KB at 97%, 36 KB at 99% and 60 KB at 100%. That's why 99% is the setting that fits, not 100%.

Detailed phone photos ran bigger than the smoother Kodak scenes at every setting. The two that missed at 97% were Kodak images with large plain areas, and a passport-style photo against a plain light wall is likely to behave like those, not like a busy street scene.

The quality gain is real but small: at this size SSIM rose from a median 0.937 at 85% to 0.965 at 99%. The point of the higher setting isn't how it looks; it's getting over the minimum without changing the pixel size.

The 10–20 KB signature at 140 × 60 pixels

We drew 12 test signatures: six signatures, each as a clean scan on white paper and as a phone photo of paper with uneven light and a little noise. A real signature is mostly blank paper, and blank paper compresses to almost nothing.

At the preferred 140 × 60 pixels, nothing reached 10 KB. Even at 100% quality the largest file was 8,840 bytes, from a noisy phone photo; the clean scans topped out under 6 KB. The 280 × 120 row shows the other trap: the 100% file was 22–31 KB, just over the limit, and compress to 20 KB brought it down to about 8 KB at 95% quality, well under the minimum.

What worked was more pixels. At 472 × 157, which is SSC's 6.0 × 2.0 cm at 200 DPI and also within GATE's allowed signature size, 95% quality put all 12 between 13.8 and 17.7 KB. Whether IBPS or SBI accept a signature bigger than their "preferred" 140 × 60 we can't test without applying, so if the portal rejects it, that's the trade-off to know about: at 140 × 60, a JPG signature in our tests could not reach 10 KB.

The other rules

Maximum-only rules were easy. For the Kerala PSC profile photo (150 × 200 pixels, up to 30 KB), all 44 photos resized at the default 85% came out between 6,390 and 14,056 bytes, with a median SSIM of 0.943. For Telangana's 100–200 KB AEE photo, we ran the full-size photos straight through compress to 200 KB with no resizing: all 44 landed between 115,320 and 199,840 bytes, inside the safe band. With no pixel size to hit, keeping the photo large is what meets a high minimum.

A step-by-step recipe

1. Read the notice for your form. Note the minimum and maximum, the pixel or cm size, the format (almost always JPG/JPEG) and the background. Work out the safe band: minimum × 1,024 to maximum × 1,000 bytes.
2. Crop first. Use crop image to frame your head and shoulders (or just the signature, with a little margin) roughly in the target shape, so nothing important is cut off later.
3. Resize to the exact size. In resize image, untick "Lock aspect ratio", type the width and height, and pick "Crop to fill": the default for a different shape is stretch, which distorts a face. Choose "JPG (smaller)".
4. Set the quality for the minimum, not the maximum. For a 20–50 KB photo at 200 × 230, set the quality slider to 99%. For a 10–20 KB signature, 95% at 472 × 157 worked for all of ours; at 140 × 60 a 10 KB minimum was out of reach.
5. Check the exact byte count. Look at the file's Properties (Windows) or Get Info (Mac), not a rounded KB label.
6. Only if it's over the maximum, run it through the matching compress page: 50 KB, 30 KB or 20 KB. These aim at 1,000-byte kilobytes and leave a JPG that already fits untouched. Then check the minimum again.
7. If it's under the minimum, don't compress. Go back to step 4 and raise the quality, or use a larger pixel size where the notice says the dimensions are only "preferred".

How we tested

Limits: on 24 October 2026 we downloaded each notice from the body's own domain (ibps.in, sbi.bank.in, ssc.gov.in, the NTA bulletins on the government's s3waas.gov.in hosting, iitm.ac.in, keralapsc.gov.in, tgpsc.gov.in and proteantech.in), extracted the text and copied the photo and signature rules word for word. Sites we couldn't open from our test machine were excluded.

Images: 20 full-size iPhone photos from Wikimedia Commons and the 24 Kodak images, listed with their licences in our editorial policy, plus 12 signatures we generated ourselves: six random cursive strokes with an underline, each rendered as a clean white-paper scan and as a phone-style photo with warm grey paper, uneven light, noise and slight blur, at 1,400 × 600 pixels.

Tools: we drove the live tool pages in Chromium with Playwright 1.64.1 on an Apple M2 Mac, as described under how we test the tools. On resize image we unticked the aspect lock, typed the width and height, chose "Crop to fill", picked PNG or JPG and set the quality slider, waiting for the preview to show the new size before saving. We then uploaded that file to the compress-to-size page for the rule and saved exactly what its download button returned. In all, 360 resize-and-compress runs and 44 compress-to-200 KB runs.

Measurements: exact file size in bytes, checked against the minimum and maximum under both 1,000 and 1,024 bytes per KB; pixel size from the decoded file; JPEG quality estimated from the file's quantisation tables; and luminance SSIM against a lossless reference made by centre-cropping the original to the target shape and resizing it with Lanczos to the same pixel size.

Limitations: our photos are scenes and buildings, not passport-style portraits, and our signatures are generated, not scanned from paper. File sizes depend on content, so yours will differ, though the pattern (small pixel sizes undershoot minimums at normal quality) held across every image. Other editors and phone apps use different JPEG encoders, so the same quality number can give a different size. We didn't submit anything to the real portals, so we can't say how each one counts a KB or whether it accepts dimensions other than the preferred ones. Notices are reissued with every recruitment, so check the current one before you upload.