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Why Your Exam Form Photo Keeps Getting Rejected

Published 2026-08-30 · Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Eight reasons Indian recruitment portals reject a photo or signature, and how to fix each one before the deadline.

Every application season, the same thing happens. The form is filled, the fee is paid, and the upload fails at the last step — usually with an error message that says almost nothing useful. Here is what is actually going wrong, in roughly the order it happens.

1. The file is a PNG

Almost every Indian recruitment portal — SSC, IBPS, NTA, the state PSCs — accepts JPG only. A PNG is refused before file size is even considered.

Renaming photo.png to photo.jpg does not work. The portal reads the file's internal header, not its extension, and a renamed PNG is still a PNG. It has to be genuinely re-encoded. Any of the tools on this site output real JPEG files, so passing your image through one solves it.

2. The file is under the minimum, not over the maximum

This is the one that catches people who have already tried to fix the problem. Specifications are published as a range — SSC asks for 20–50 KB, IBPS for 20–50 KB, NEET for 10–200 KB on the photo and 3–30 KB on the signature.

A photo compressed down to 6 KB fails just as certainly as one at 80 KB. If you have squeezed a file repeatedly trying to get it accepted, check whether you have gone under the floor.

3. The pixel dimensions are wrong

IBPS and SBI publish an exact requirement: 200 × 230 pixels for the photograph and 140 × 60 pixels for the signature. Not "about that" — exactly that. A file of the right size in kilobytes but the wrong dimensions is rejected.

SSC is different: it now captures the photograph live inside the application module, so no fixed pixel dimension is published for it. The signature is still an upload and still has to meet 140 × 60.

Presets for both: IBPS PO, SSC CGL, signature at 140 × 60.

4. The signature is in capital letters

IBPS and SBI both reject block-capital signatures explicitly. A signature is supposed to be your running handwriting. If you normally sign in capitals, you will need a different signature for the form than the one you use elsewhere.

5. The signature background is grey

This happens when the signature is photographed rather than scanned. Under room lighting, white paper photographs as light grey, and portals that check for a white background reject it.

Scan it if you can. If you must use a phone, shoot in bright, even daylight, keep the phone parallel to the paper, and make sure no shadow — including your own — falls across it.

6. The signature is tiny inside a large white margin

A 140 × 60 pixel box is small. If your scan includes half a sheet of paper, the signature itself ends up a few pixels tall and is rejected as illegible. Crop tightly to the strokes first, leaving only a thin margin, and then resize.

7. The photo is old, or missing required text

Several boards require the photograph to be recent, and some cycles require the candidate's name and the date of the photograph printed beneath the image. UPSC and NTA have both required this in recent years. This is not something a resizing tool can add for you — it has to be part of the photograph.

8. You compressed an already-compressed file

Every JPEG save discards information permanently. Compressing a file that has already been compressed three times produces visible blocking and colour smearing well before it reaches the target size. Always start from the original photograph.

The order to do this in

  1. Start from the original photo and a fresh, tightly cropped signature scan.
  2. Confirm the exact specification in the official notification for your exam and cycle.
  3. Set dimensions first, then file size — in that order, because resizing changes the size.
  4. Check you are inside the range, not merely under the maximum.
  5. Prepare both files before you open the form. Portals get very slow near the deadline.

Presets by exam

Each of these pages carries the published specification, its source, and the date we last verified it, along with a tool preset to match:

One caution. Specifications change between cycles, and regional boards differ from one another. Every page here is dated and sourced so you can see how current it is — but the official notification for your exam always wins. Check it.