How to Resize a Photo and Signature for RRB Railway Exams

If you have been searching for "RRB photo size" and getting a different number from every website, there is a reason, and it is not that one of them is right.

RRB does not publish a standing specification

The Railway Recruitment Boards issue requirements inside each Centralised Employment Notification — the CEN document for that recruitment — rather than maintaining one page that applies to everything. NTPC, Group D, ALP and the technician posts have each carried their own figures, and those figures have changed between cycles.

This is why we print no number for RRB on this site. Every aggregator that confidently states "RRB photo size: 50 KB" is quoting one notification from one year, and the odds that it is your notification are not good. A wrong number here costs you the form.

Finding it in the CEN, quickly

1. Open the CEN PDF for the post you are applying to — not a news article about it, the PDF itself.
2. Search the document for KB. That single search almost always lands directly on the upload table, because kilobytes appear nowhere else in the document.
3. Note four things: the file size range for the photograph, the range for the signature, the pixel dimensions if any are given, and the accepted format.
4. Check the minimum as well as the maximum. Railway notifications state ranges, and the floor is enforced.

Then prepare the files

Once you have the numbers, the work itself is ordinary. These pages take a target and hit it:

• Photo and signature resizer — enter whatever size and dimensions your CEN specifies. This is the page to use when the target is not a standard one.
• Reduce an image to under 50 KB · under 100 KB · under 200 KB — if your CEN names one of these common targets.
• Signature under 20 KB · under 30 KB · under 50 KB

The method, in the order that works

Every one of these forms checks the same four things, and they are checked independently. A file can pass three and fail the fourth.

1. Format. JPG. Not PNG, not HEIC, not WebP, whatever your phone saved it as. Renaming the file does not convert it — portals read the bytes inside, not the extension.
2. Pixel dimensions, where the board publishes them.
3. File size, which is almost always a range rather than a ceiling.
4. Content — plain background, face filling most of the frame, a signature in running handwriting on white paper.

Do them in that order. Cropping and resizing change the file size, so if you compress first you will have to do it again. Set the dimensions, then squeeze the kilobytes, then check you are still above the minimum.

Things that are consistent across RRB cycles

These have not varied, even as the sizes have:

• JPEG only. No PNG, no PDF for the photograph.
• Recent photograph, plain light background, face clearly visible, no cap and no dark glasses.
• Signature in running handwriting, in black or blue ink on white paper, not in capitals.
• The photograph is checked again at the exam centre against the person who turns up. A heavily edited or years-old photograph is a problem later even if it uploads cleanly now.

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.

RRB preset pages

RRB NTPC, RRB Group D, RRB ALP — each explains the per-notification rule and links to the board.

Boards that do publish a standing specification, with the figures: the full directory.