GATE Photo and Signature Size

How to use this tool

1. Choose your image, drag it onto the box, or paste it from the clipboard. JPG, PNG, WebP and HEIC all go in; JPEG comes out.
2. There is nothing to set. This page is already fixed at between 5.0 KB and 600.0 KB, JPEG.
3. Check the verdict before downloading. Because this form has a floor as well as a ceiling, the panel tells you whether the file landed inside 5.0 KB–600.0 KB — not merely under the top.

GATE is run by a different IIT each year, so confirm against the organising institute for your cycle. The 2026 page adds rules the file size will not catch: the face must cover 60–70% of the frame after cropping, the photo aspect ratio must fall between 0.66 and 0.89, and the signature must occupy 70–80% of its image with a height-to-width ratio between 1:2.75 and 1:3.75. No caps or sunglasses; spectacles are allowed unless they glare.

GATE Photo and Signature Size — the specification

GATE Photo and Signature Size: why uploads get rejected

A file can be the right size and still bounce — and here the size itself has two edges, since anything under 5 KB is refused just as firmly as anything over 600 KB. These are the failures that actually come up:

• The upload is a PNG. The GATE portal reads the file header, not the extension, so renaming photo.png to photo.jpg changes nothing — it is refused before the 600 KB limit is even considered. Re-encode it as real JPEG.
• The photograph came in under 5 KB. GATE publishes a range, 5–600 KB, and the floor is enforced as strictly as the ceiling. Candidates who compress repeatedly to "be safe" usually fail this way.
• The signature does not meet 250 × 80 to 580 × 180 px, 3–300 KB, JPEG, black or dark blue ink. It is a separate upload from the photograph with its own limit, and it is the one most often overlooked.
• The signature was photographed rather than scanned, so white paper came out grey and the 300 KB limit forced the quality down further. Sign in black or dark blue on plain white paper, shoot in daylight with no shadow across the page, and crop tightly to the strokes before resizing — a signature floating in half a sheet of paper ends up a few pixels tall once it is fitted to the box.

How it works

Hitting a size limit exactly is a search problem, not a setting. There is no quality value that means “600.0 KB” — how many bytes a given quality produces depends entirely on the picture. So this tool encodes, measures the real file, and adjusts.

It then binary-searches the quality parameter: encode, measure, halve the remaining range, repeat. The run below took 7 encodes to land at 197.6 KB. A tool that picks one fixed quality instead either overshoots the limit or comes in far under it and throws away detail you did not need to lose.

Every one of those encodes ran on your own device through the browser’s canvas API — including the intermediate attempts the search threw away. None of them was uploaded.

A measured run of this exact preset

Not an estimate: this page’s own code, run against a 3 MP photograph and an A4 scan at 200 dpi, with every encode recorded. The files and the method are published here.

Step by step

The first probe at quality 0.96 came out at 966.9 KB, about 1.6× the 600.0 KB limit, so the search began.

It then narrowed the quality setting 6 times — quality 0.51 gave 155.8 KB, quality 0.73 gave 295.8 KB, quality 0.62 gave 197.6 KB, quality 0.68 gave 258.8 KB, and so on — settling on quality 0.62.

Final file: 197.6 KB, using 32.9% of the allowance, with 402.4 KB to spare.

Who needs GATE Photo and Signature Size

Candidates filling the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering form, usually close to the deadline when the gate2026.iitg.ac.in portal is slowest. Having the photograph and signature ready in the right format and inside 5–600 KB removes the most common reason a submission fails at the final step.

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Background reading: Why Your Exam Form Photo Keeps Getting Rejected