Resize a photo for an Indian visa application

The Indian visa portal rejects a photograph for its shape and its file size before anybody looks at your face. It wants a JPEG, it wants the height and width to be equal, and it wants the file between 10 KB and 300 KB. Miss any of the three and the upload bounces with a message that rarely says which one.

This page applies all three at once. Drop in a photo and it is centre-cropped to a square, saved as JPEG, and compressed to sit inside the size range — in this browser tab, with the file never leaving your device.

What this page does, and what it cannot

Applied automatically, every time:

• Saved as JPG
• Kept within 300 KB
• Checked against the 10 KB minimum, and flagged if it falls under
• Cropped to square (equal width and height)

Your job, because a converter cannot judge it. Indian Visa Online (Ministry of Home Affairs) also requires the following, and this tool has no way to tell whether your image complies:

• Full face, front view, eyes open
• Head centred, showing the full head from top of hair to bottom of chin
• Plain light-coloured or white background
• No shadows on the face or the background
• No borders

Common questions

Why is my photo cropped?

The portal requires the height and width to be equal. A phone photo is usually 4:3 or 3:4, so the long side is trimmed evenly from both ends to make it square. Because the crop is from the centre, a photo where your head is off to one side or very close to the top may lose part of it — check the result before uploading, and re-frame and retake if it cut something important.

It says my file is under the 10 KB minimum.

The portal sets a floor as well as a ceiling, and a very small or very plain photo can compress below it. Padding the file to reach 10 KB would be dishonest and would not improve the picture, so this tool tells you instead. Use a larger, sharper original — a photo straight from a phone camera rather than one already shrunk by a messaging app.

Does this make my photo acceptable?

It makes the format, size and shape correct. It cannot judge the things the spec says about the picture itself — the background, the lighting, your expression, whether your whole head is in frame. Those are listed on this page so you can check them yourself, and they are the usual reason a correctly sized photo is still rejected.

Is 300 KB right? I have read 200 KB elsewhere.

Different Indian government portals ask for different limits, and many of them do use 200 KB. The number here is 300 KB because that is what the visa portal publishes in its own instructions, linked at the bottom of this page. If you are filling in a different form, use its own stated limit — the general compression tool on this site lets you pick one.