Search for the photo size for almost any Indian government exam and you will find a table. Search again on a different site and you will find the same table. Same numbers, same column order, often the same typos.
That agreement is not evidence that the numbers are right. It is evidence that everybody copied the same source. And where the copies disagree, at least one of them is wrong — which means somebody is uploading a file built to a spec that does not exist.
So we started opening the notifications instead.
How we check
Every claim on this site is meant to be traceable to a PDF published by the authority that runs the exam. The process is deliberately boring:
- Find the notification PDF on the authority's own domain — not an aggregator, not a coaching site.
- Extract its text and locate the clause that states the upload specification.
- Record the page number, so anyone can open the same PDF and read the same sentence.
- Compare it to what we have stored. If they differ, the notification wins.
Step 2 is harder than it sounds, and it is the reason this work is rare. Government notifications are long — the SSC CGL 2026 notice runs to 132 pages — and many of them embed subset fonts, which means the text in the file is stored as glyph numbers rather than letters. Extracted naively, an SSC notice comes out as an empty string and looks like a scanned image. It is not. Each font carries a small translation table, and once you follow it the whole document reads normally. Until we built that step, every SSC, NTA and JEE notification looked unreadable to us.
The finding that surprised us most
SSC does not publish pixel dimensions. For any exam. At all.
We checked two separate SSC 2026 notices end to end. Across 132 pages of the CGL notice and 85 pages of the Combined Hindi Translators notice, the number of pixel dimensions printed is zero. The only upload size stated anywhere is a file size, and it appears three times in each document:
That is clause 9.6, page 18 of the CGL 2026 notice. SSC specifies the signature in centimetres, not pixels — and specifies no photograph upload size whatsoever, because since the move to the new portal the photograph is not uploaded at all. Clause 9.4:
You sit in front of the camera and the portal takes the picture.
So where does "SSC CGL photo: 275 × 354 px, 20–50 KB" come from? Not from SSC. And the two competing signature figures resolve cleanly once you see the real sentence:
- 236 × 79 px is exactly 6.0 × 2.0 cm converted at 100 DPI. Someone did the arithmetic and published the result.
- 140 × 60 px is IBPS's signature dimension, which shares the same 10–20 KB band. It appears to have been copied across to SSC's row because the file sizes matched. Its aspect ratio is 2.3:1; SSC's is 3:1. They are not the same shape.
If you are applying to an SSC exam: land inside 10–20 KB, keep the signature roughly three times as wide as it is tall, and ignore every pixel figure you have been shown.
The eleven disagreements
These are the exams where the published numbers contradict each other. We are documenting them rather than silently picking a winner, because on most of these we have not yet read the notification and a confident guess would be worse than an honest gap.
| Exam | What the charts disagree about |
|---|---|
| SSC CGL | Resolved. SSC publishes no pixel size; 10–20 KB, about 6.0 × 2.0 cm. See above. |
| UPSC Civil Services | Photo given as both 400 × 400 and 350 × 350 px. Both fall inside the 350–1000 px range UPSC states, so either should pass. |
| RRB NTPC | Some charts say 240 × 240 px, others 320 × 240 px. RRB specs vary by zone and year. |
| RRB Group D | Same 240 × 240 vs 320 × 240 split as NTPC. |
| Delhi Police Constable | One widely-copied chart lists a 40 × 60 px signature — almost certainly a typo for 140 × 60. At 40 px wide a signature is illegible. |
| UPSSSC PET | Charts split sharply: 350 × 450 px at 50–100 KB, or 180 × 216 px at 20–50 KB. These are not close. |
| TNPSC | Some charts still list 150 × 200 px. TNPSC changed its OTR upload rules. |
| JEE Main | Photo ceiling given as both 200 KB and 300 KB. Staying under 200 KB satisfies either. |
| GATE | 200 × 260, 350 × 450 and 480 × 640 all appear. The organising institute rotates annually and republishes its own numbers. |
| Mizoram PSC | One chart lists no lower bound and a 10 MB ceiling — that reads like an unfilled template, not a rule. |
| Nagaland PSC | One chart lists no minimum file size. Treat the lower bound as unknown. |
Two patterns are worth noticing. The 40 × 60 and 10 MB entries are not disagreements about fact, they are propagated typos and placeholder values that nobody re-read. And the RRB and GATE cases are not errors at all — those bodies genuinely change their specs between cycles and zones, so any single number is right for some candidates and wrong for others.
What this means if you are applying
The file size band is almost always the hard constraint. Portals reject on file size far more often than on exact pixel dimensions, and several — SSC among them — never state pixel dimensions to begin with.
So, in order:
- Open your own notification and find the upload clause. It is usually in the "How to apply" section, and it is usually about two-thirds of the way through.
- Hit the KB band exactly, including its lower bound. A file that is too small is refused just like one that is too large — see why portals reject files that are too small.
- Treat pixel dimensions as a target, not a rule, unless your notification states them explicitly.
- If a chart gives you a number your notification does not contain, believe the notification.
Where we have got to
Being straight about this: of 128 exam presets on this site, 3 are currently verified against the notification itself — IBPS PO, IBPS Clerk (CRP CSA-XVI) and IBPS RRB. Every one of those matched our stored specs on all four uploads: photograph, signature, thumb impression and handwritten declaration.
The rest carry an "unverified" badge and a link to the authority, because that is what they are. We would rather show you a gap than a confident number we have not checked. Each exam page states which of the two it is, and the verified ones cite the page you can read it on.
That list will get longer. This page will be updated as it does.