SSC CGL 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 20.0 KB and 50.0 KB, JPEG.
3. It scales the image down first — on our reference file, to 1067 × 800 px — then searches the encoder quality. That run took 7 encodes.
4. 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 20.0 KB–50.0 KB — not merely under the top.

SSC captures the candidate photograph live inside the application module, so no fixed pixel dimension is published for it — the 3.5 × 4.5 cm guidance describes the printed equivalent. The signature is still a file upload and must meet the 10–20 KB rule.

SSC CGL Photo and Signature Size — the specification

SSC CGL 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 20 KB is refused just as firmly as anything over 50 KB. These are the failures that actually come up:

• The upload is a PNG. The SSC CGL portal reads the file header, not the extension, so renaming photo.png to photo.jpg changes nothing — it is refused before the 50 KB limit is even considered. Re-encode it as real JPEG.
• The photograph came in under 20 KB. SSC CGL publishes a range, 20–50 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 140 × 60 px, 10–20 KB, JPG. 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 20 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 “50.0 KB” — how many bytes a given quality produces depends entirely on the picture. So this tool encodes, measures the real file, and adjusts.

It starts by capping the pixel count, because quality alone cannot rescue an image that is simply too large. On the reference file measured below that meant going from 4032 × 3024 to 1067 × 800 before the first encode. That ordering is what keeps the search cheap: the six or seven encodes that follow all work on the smaller image.

It then binary-searches the quality parameter: encode, measure, halve the remaining range, repeat. The run below took 7 encodes to land at 49.7 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 12.2 MP photograph, landscape and an A4 scan at 200 dpi, with every encode recorded. The files and the method are published here.

Step by step

Before touching quality at all, the tool worked out how many pixels 50.0 KB can realistically describe, and scaled the image from 4032 × 3024 down to 1067 × 800 — 93% fewer pixels. Doing this first is what keeps the run quick: every attempt after it encodes the smaller image rather than the original.

The first probe at quality 0.96 came out at 270.1 KB, about 5.4× the 50.0 KB limit, so the search began.

It then narrowed the quality setting 6 times — quality 0.51 gave 52.9 KB, quality 0.29 gave 33.5 KB, quality 0.4 gave 43.8 KB, quality 0.45 gave 48.6 KB, and so on — settling on quality 0.45.

Final file: 49.7 KB, using 99.4% of the allowance, with 318 B to spare.

Who needs SSC CGL Photo and Signature Size

Candidates filling the Staff Selection Commission Combined Graduate Level form, usually close to the deadline when the ssc.gov.in portal is slowest. Having the photograph and signature ready in the right format and inside 20–50 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