Photo and Signature Size for Online Applications

Online application portals, such as recruitment portals in Bangladesh, ask for a photo and a signature with a fixed width and height in pixels and a maximum file size in kilobytes. Photos from a phone are far too large, and uploading them fails with "wrong dimensions" or "file too large". This guide explains the three numbers involved and a reliable order of steps.

Three different things

• Pixel dimensions are the width and height of the picture, for example 300 × 300 for a photo or 300 × 80 for a signature. A portal that checks them checks the exact numbers. Resizing a picture to exact dimensions that do not match its shape stretches it, so crop to the right proportions first.
• File size is how many kilobytes the file takes on disk. It depends on the pixel dimensions, the format and, for JPEG, the quality setting. A 300 × 300 JPEG at good quality is usually far below 100 KB; a phone photo of 4000 × 3000 pixels can be several megabytes.
• DPI is only a label saying how large the picture should print. Portals that give a size in pixels do not care about it, and changing it does not change pixels or size. See DPI vs pixels.

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes to some programs and 1024 to others. Staying below the limit when 1 KB is counted as 1000 bytes satisfies both.

A reliable order

1. Take a good source. Even light on the face, a plain light background, the camera straight on and the whole head and shoulders in view for a photo; for a signature, a black pen on plain white paper, photographed in daylight without shadows.
2. Crop to the portal's proportions. A square for 300 × 300, a wide strip for 300 × 80. Decide what to keep before you resize.
3. Resize to the exact pixel size. Reduce in steps for a clean result.
4. Find the highest JPEG quality that fits the limit. A tool can try qualities between very low and very high and keep the best that stays below the limit.
5. Check the result on the portal's own validator if there is one, before the final submission.

The Teletalk photo and signature resizer does steps 2 to 4 in your browser, with a crop you can move, a button that centres the crop on a detected face, a whitening option for signatures, a before and after table and a preset for the Teletalk numbers (a 300 × 300 photo under 100 KB in colour and a 300 × 80 signature under 60 KB), each with the page it was read from. The numbers can be edited for other portals. Each portal and each circular can differ, so use the numbers from your own advertisement.

What else a portal may check

Besides size, portals often ask for a colour photo, a particular background colour, a recent date, no glasses or hats, the face looking at the camera and a particular file type. A resizing tool cannot guarantee those, and none of them is judged by pixel and size limits. If the photo is rejected after it fits, read the instructions on the page again.

Related tools

To remove the paper and shadows from a signature photo before you resize it, use the Signature Background Remover; to change only the size of any picture, Resize Image and Compress Image (these two upload the file to our server, while the application-portal resizer does not); to print passport-size photos on a sheet, the Passport & ID Photo Print Sheet.