PAN card photo and signature resizer

When you apply for a new PAN online through Protean (the service that used to be called NSDL e-Gov) and choose to upload scanned images, the form checks three kinds of files. The photograph must be a colour JPEG scanned at 200 DPI, 3.5 by 2.5 centimetres, and no bigger than 20 KB. The signature must also be a colour JPEG at 200 DPI, 2 by 4.5 centimetres, and no bigger than 10 KB. Supporting documents, such as your proof of identity, address and date of birth, must be black and white at 200 DPI, as a PDF/A or JPEG, and no more than 300 KB for each page.

Those numbers are copied from the Protean guidelines page linked in the table above, and the date we last read that page is shown next to it. The notice writes the photo as “3.5X2.5 cms”. A passport-style photo is taller than it is wide, so the tool makes it 2.5 cm wide and 3.5 cm tall. The signature is written as “2X4.5 cms”, so the tool makes a wide strip, 4.5 cm across and 2 cm high.

A photo straight from a phone camera is usually 2 to 5 MB. That is a hundred times more than 20 KB. It is also the wrong shape, because phone pictures are wide or tall rectangles, not a small passport frame. The tool fixes both at once. It crops the picture to the passport shape, sets the pixel size for 200 DPI, and then lowers the JPEG quality step by step until the file is just under the limit. It only makes the picture smaller in pixels if the quality floor is still too heavy.

The signature is the harder of the two, because 10 KB is very small. A signature photographed on a desk often has a grey or yellow tint, a shadow from the phone, and the edge of a table in the frame. All of that adds weight to the file. Sign on plain white paper with a dark pen, take the photo in daylight, and crop close to the signature before you drop it in. The tool keeps the whole signature and fills any gap with white, so the ink is not cut off.

Open the downloaded photo and look at it at full size. Your face should be clear and in focus, with no glare on glasses. The PAN card is printed from this file, so a blurry upload gives you a blurry card. If the result looks too soft, start again from a sharper original rather than squeezing the same file twice.

This page is for the Protean (NSDL) online form. UTIITSL runs a separate PAN service with its own upload screen. We have not confirmed its sizes, so read the limits shown on that screen and type them into the boxes here if they differ. The same applies if Protean changes its rules: the official page wins over anything written here.