Every recruitment board in India publishes its own photo and signature requirements, in its own notification, in its own units. The numbers are similar enough to feel interchangeable and different enough that using the wrong ones gets your application rejected.
This page collects the requirements for the major exams in one place, along with the rules that cause the most rejections. As always, confirm against the current year's official notification before you submit, boards change these between cycles without announcement.
Photographs
| Exam | Dimensions | File size | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSC (CGL, CHSL, MTS, GD) | 3.5 × 4.5 cm (413 × 531 px) | 20–50 KB | JPEG |
| IBPS / SBI | 200 × 230 px | 20–50 KB | JPEG |
| UPSC Civil Services | 350 × 350 px minimum | 20–300 KB | JPEG |
| NTA (NEET, JEE) | Passport style, 3.5 × 4.5 cm | 10–200 KB | JPEG |
Signatures
| Exam | Dimensions | File size |
|---|---|---|
| SSC | 6.0 × 2.0 cm (709 × 236 px) | 10–20 KB |
| IBPS / SBI | 140 × 60 px | 10–20 KB |
| Most others | Roughly 3:1 | Under 20 KB |
Every one of these has a minimum
Look again at the size columns. Not one of them is a simple ceiling, they are all windows. A photo at 12 KB fails just as surely as one at 200 KB, and the failure message rarely distinguishes between the two.
This matters enormously for signatures. Black ink on white paper, cropped tightly and sized to 140 × 60 pixels, compresses to about 4 KB at maximum quality. There is no setting that makes it larger, because there is no more detail to store. You are below the floor by following the instructions correctly.
The proper fix is to pad the file with a metadata block that decoders ignore, the image stays untouched and the file reaches the required size. Our signature tool does this automatically. See the minimum file size problem for the full explanation.
The rules people miss
Signatures must not be in capital letters
SSC and IBPS state this explicitly. A signature must be a signature, not your name printed out. Applications have been rejected at the document verification stage for this alone, after the exam, after the wait.
Black ink on white paper
Not blue. Not a gel pen that skips. The requirement is specific and it is checked, because a blue signature scanned in colour and then converted to greyscale can end up very faint.
200 × 230 is not a normal photo shape
The IBPS dimension is a 20:23 ratio, which no camera produces. Resizing a 3:4 phone photo into it squashes your face. You have to crop to that shape first, then resize.
Some cycles want the name and date on the photo
UPSC and NTA have required the candidate's name and the date the photo was taken to be printed below the face in certain years. It is not universal and it changes between cycles, which is exactly why it gets missed. Read the current notification.
A live photo may be required
Some SSC cycles capture the photograph through the application portal using your webcam or phone camera rather than accepting an upload. If so, the dimension rules above do not apply, but the composition rules still do.
Getting a good result at 20 KB
Twenty kilobytes is genuinely tight, and the difference between a clear photo and a blocky one at that size comes down entirely to order of operations.
- Crop first, to the exact ratio the exam requires.
- Resize second, to the exact pixel dimensions.
- Compress last, to just under the ceiling.
Compressing a 12-megapixel original straight down to 20 KB gives you a mess, because the encoder is trying to describe 12 million pixels within a budget that suits about 45,000. Resize first and the same 20 KB is comfortable.
Photographing your signature
- Sign larger than feels natural, around 6 cm wide. More ink means more detail surviving the downscale.
- Use black ink on plain white paper with no lines.
- Photograph it flat, from directly above, in daylight, with your shadow out of the frame.
- Fill the frame with the paper. No desk, no hands.
Room lighting tints white paper grey or yellow, and portals expect white. The signature tool finds the ink, crops to it, whitens the paper and hits the size window in one pass.
Before you submit
- Read the current year's notification. These numbers change.
- Check the downloaded file's actual size against both limits.
- Open the files at full size, if you cannot read your own signature, neither can the verifier.
- Keep the originals. You will need them again for the next form.
The exact requirements are also in our database as individual entries with official source links: SSC photo, SSC signature, IBPS photo, IBPS signature, UPSC and NEET / JEE.