Photo, signature and document tools for Indian online forms

Every online application form in India — SSC, banking, railways, university admission, passport, PAN — asks for the same handful of files, with rules that are oddly specific and never the same twice. Photo in JPG between 20 and 50 KB. Signature under 20 KB. 200 DPI. Exactly 200 × 230 pixels.

Then it rejects your upload and tells you nothing useful about why.

Here is what forms actually ask for, and which free tool fixes each one. Everything linked below runs in your browser — your documents are never uploaded anywhere.

What forms usually want

Always read the official notification, because every board sets its own numbers. That said, the requirements cluster:

Scanned documents — mark sheets, certificates, ID proof — are usually PDF, commonly capped at 100 KB to 1 MB per file.

The four things that get uploads rejected

1. The file is a few KB over. A 51 KB photo fails a 50 KB limit. Use Compress image to 50 KB or 20 KB and aim slightly under the limit, not at it.

2. Wrong format. An iPhone photo is HEIC, not JPG, and renaming the file does not change that. Convert it properly with HEIC to JPG. PNG screenshots need PNG to JPG.

3. Wrong dimensions. Size in KB and size in pixels are two separate checks and portals test both. Set the pixel width with Image resizer, or crop to the right shape first with Crop image.

4. Wrong DPI. When a form asks for 200 or 300 DPI it is checking a number stored inside the file. Set it with the 200 DPI converter or 300 DPI converter — for JPG this changes a header value, so quality is untouched.

The order that works

Doing these in the wrong order is why photos come out blurry. Crop first, resize second, compress last.

1. Crop to the required shape — Passport size photo maker handles 35 × 45 mm, 2 × 2 inch and the other standard presets with a guide oval for your face.
2. Resize to the pixel width the notification states.
3. Set the DPI, if one is specified.
4. Compress to the KB limit.

Squeezing a 4 MB camera photo straight down to 20 KB without cropping is what produces the smeared result. Fewer pixels first means the compressor can keep more quality in the ones that remain.

Signature, specifically

Sign in the middle of plain unlined white paper with a black or blue pen — a gel pen gives a cleaner line than a ballpoint. Photograph it in daylight with the light coming from the side, holding the phone flat and parallel to the page so it does not come out as a trapezoid. Then crop tightly to the ink and compress.

Capital letters are rejected by some boards. So is signing on lined paper. The notification says which.

Scanned documents

For certificates and mark sheets, the Document scanner straightens a phone photo and turns it into a clean PDF — in black and white mode the file is tiny and the text stays sharp. Combine several into one with Merge PDF, then hit the portal's limit with Compress PDF to 100 KB.

Check before you upload

Open the finished file in the Photo metadata viewer and read its real dimensions, format and size. Compare all three against the notification. Portals check them as separate rules — passing two of three still fails, and the error message rarely says which one.

Step-by-step versions

If you would rather follow one job end to end, there are detailed guides for photo and signature for exam forms, making a passport photo at home and changing image DPI.

All of it is free, with no sign-up and no watermark — we build and publish these tools alongside our client work. If your organisation needs something similar built properly, tell us what you need.