Aadhaar Photo Size: What UIDAI Actually Requires

Search for "Aadhaar photo size" and you will find a confident number — 200 KB is the popular one — repeated across a dozen tool sites. It is worth knowing where that number is not from.

You cannot upload a photograph to change your Aadhaar photo

UIDAI classifies the facial photograph as biometric information, alongside iris and fingerprints, not as a demographic field. Its page on updating Aadhaar data sets out the split plainly:

• Demographic information — name, address, date of birth, gender, mobile number, email, relationship status.
• Biometric information — iris, fingerprints and facial photograph.

The online route on the myAadhaar portal covers address update, where what you upload is a supporting proof-of-address document. A biometric update, photograph included, is done in person at an Aadhaar Enrolment Centre or Aadhaar Seva Kendra, where the operator captures it and authenticates you biometrically on the spot.

So there is no photograph file to prepare, and no file size for one. The figure circulating online describes somebody else's upload form.

Source: UIDAI, Updating Data on Aadhaar, uidai.gov.in — read 4 November 2026. Rules and fees change; confirm on the UIDAI site before you travel to a centre.

What people searching this actually need

The query covers four unrelated jobs. Here is which one is yours.

1. Your document scan is too large for the myAadhaar upload

This is the real file-size problem. You are uploading a proof-of-address document — a scanned bill, rent agreement or passport page — and the portal is refusing it. The accepted formats and the cap are stated on the upload screen itself at the time you use it; read them there rather than trusting a figure from elsewhere, because this is exactly the number that moves.

Then bring the file under whatever it says:

• Compress a PDF to under 500 KB · under 1 MB · under 2 MB
• Reduce an image to under 500 KB · under 1 MB
• Compress a scanned document — if the scan is the problem rather than the document.

Scans are usually enormous because the scanner saved at 600 dpi when 200 was plenty. Nothing is uploaded to us while you fix that, which is the point when the file is a copy of your passport.

2. You want a passport-size photo of yourself, for something else

Often the real need: a passport-format photograph for a form, where Aadhaar was just the example that came to mind.

413 × 531 pixels is the standard 3.5 × 4.5 cm passport crop at 300 dpi, and the photo and signature resizer takes any dimensions and size target you have been given.

3. You are printing your Aadhaar card

The e-Aadhaar PDF downloaded from UIDAI is already laid out at the correct size. Print it at 100% scale — not "fit to page", which silently shrinks it — and the card comes out right. If you want the PVC card, UIDAI sells an official one; ordering it from UIDAI is the only way to get a genuine card, and a laminated home printout is not the same thing.

4. You are filling an exam or job form that asks for Aadhaar details

Then the photograph specification you need is the exam board's, not UIDAI's — and those we do publish, from the boards' own sites. See the directory.

Why the wrong number spread

Two reasons, and both are instructive if you are checking any specification online. First, Aadhaar enrolment and update did involve uploaded photographs at various points in its history and through various enrolment software, so old figures are floating around with nothing to mark them as old. Second, a tool site that publishes a number ranks for the query, and a tool site that says "there is no such number" has nothing to sell you.

The general test: if a page states a government specification without naming the document it came from, it is repeating another page. On this site, 19 of the 45 exam specifications carry the source they were read from, and the other 26 print no figure at all for exactly this reason.

Every tool linked here runs inside your browser. Your photograph and signature are never uploaded to this site or anywhere else, which matters rather more than usual when the file is a scan of your signature.