Disclaimer
Disclaimer
photosizeincrease.com is an independent free tool with no connection to any exam board, government department or application portal. This page explains why the site refuses to publish exam photo size limits it has not verified, where to find your real requirement, and what image quality honestly costs at small file sizes.
Written and maintained by Rizwan Aslam
Last updated
We are not connected to any exam board or government body
photosizeincrease.com is an independent free tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by any government department, examination authority, recruitment board or application portal.
Names of exams or portals may appear on this site only to explain what people are trying to do. Their use does not suggest any relationship or approval.
Why this site does not list photo sizes for each exam
Almost every competing site publishes a neat table of exam names and KB limits. We do not, and the reason matters.
When those tables were checked against each other, they disagreed. For one single well known exam, three separate confident looking sources gave three different photo size ranges.
| Source | Photo size it claims |
|---|---|
| Source A | 20 KB to 200 KB |
| Source B | 20 KB to 300 KB |
| Source C | 20 KB to 50 KB |
At least two of those are wrong. A candidate who trusts the wrong one can have an application rejected, and by the time that is discovered the portal has usually closed.
So this site gives you universal targets and teaches you to read your own requirement. When a specification is verified directly from an official notification, it will be published with that source named.
Where to find your real requirement
Three places, in this order. Stop at the first one that gives you a number.
- The official notification or information brochure for your exam or application, usually a PDF
- The upload page itself, which often prints the accepted size and dimensions just above the file selector
- The help desk listed on that portal, if the first two are silent
For Indian recruitment and civil service applications, the official sources are the Staff Selection Commission and the Union Public Service Commission websites. Coaching sites and news articles are not official sources, however confident they sound.
The honest position on image quality
Any tool that promises no quality loss at any size is selling you something. Below a certain file size, detail has to go, and that is a property of the image, not a weakness in one particular tool.
The useful way to think about it is bits per pixel, which is simply how much file you have left for each pixel in the picture. Here are the bands, measured on real files.
| Bits per pixel | What you see |
|---|---|
| 1.2 and above | Excellent, no visible difference |
| 0.8 to 1.2 | Very good, safe for any form |
| 0.55 to 0.8 | Acceptable, slight softness on close inspection |
| 0.35 to 0.55 | Visible artifacts, especially around text and edges |
| Below 0.35 | Heavy artifacts, clearly degraded |
A worked example from our own testing
A detailed 1536 by 1024 image started at 10.18 bits per pixel as a PNG. Forced down to 50 KB at full resolution, it landed at 0.26 bits per pixel, deep in the heavy artifact band. To keep that same image looking clean at full size it needed roughly 264 KB, not 50 KB.
No tool escapes this. What this one does instead is show you the forecast before you convert, and offer to scale the image down slightly so the encoder is not crushed.
What exact size does and does not guarantee
The tool lands on the exact byte you asked for. That part is measured and it is reliable.
What it cannot guarantee is that a specific portal will accept the file, because portals also check dimensions, format, aspect ratio, background colour and sometimes the visible content of the photo. Meeting the KB limit is one condition out of several.
- Always open the finished file and look at it before uploading
- Always keep the original, so you can start again at a different target
- Check dimensions separately if the form asks for them in pixels
No professional advice
The guides on this site are technical explanations about images and file sizes. They are not legal advice, career advice or official guidance about any application process.
Information here is kept current and corrected when it is found to be wrong, but no site can promise that every detail is accurate at every moment. If you find a mistake, please report it on the contact page and it will be checked.
The rest of the ground rules are in the terms of use and the privacy policy.
Frequently asked questions
Is photosizeincrease.com an official government website?
No. It is an independent free tool and it has no connection to any exam board, government department or application portal. Always take your photo requirements from the official notification itself.
Why do you not list the photo size for each exam?
Because the published numbers disagree with each other. For one commonly asked exam, three confident sources quote three different photo ranges. Repeating a wrong number could get somebody’s application rejected.
Will my photo lose quality when I compress it to a small size?
Below a certain size, yes, and no tool can avoid it. A detailed image squeezed to 50 KB has very little data left per pixel. The tool shows you a quality forecast before you convert so the result is not a surprise.
Where should I check my real photo size requirement?
In the official notification, information brochure or upload page of the portal you are applying on. That is the only source that decides whether your file is accepted.