Add Name and Date on Photo

A photo studio hands you passport photos with your name and a date printed along the bottom, or a form's instructions say the photograph must show the candidate's name and the date it was taken. If you already have a good photo on your phone, you do not need the studio for that strip. You do need to be sure the form wants it, and that adding it does not break the size rule.

Does your form ask for it?

This is the first question, because the answer is different from one form to the next and has changed over the years.

Some forms say nothing about it, and some forbid writing on the photo. Two current examples, both read from the official documents:

• UPSC. The instructions on its application portal list what the photograph must be: colour, white background, face covering three quarters of the frame, both ears visible. They add that the photograph is not to be signed. They do not ask for a name or a date, although several coaching sites say they do.
• NEET (UG) 2026. The bulletin asks for a recent passport size photograph "taken after 01 January 2026", in JPG between 10 kb and 200 kb, with 80% of the image being the face against a white background. It does not ask for a name or date on it. It does warn that photographs which "seem to be hand-made or computer made" can lead to rejection.

Some forms do not take an uploaded photo at all. Railway recruitment notices from 2025 capture the photograph live through the camera during the application and take only the signature as a file. A strip cannot be added to a live capture, and nothing asks for one.

And some forms do ask for this strip. We could not confirm one from an official notice current in October 2026, but the request is common enough, mostly in state-level recruitment, that photo studios print the strip as a matter of course. If your notice carries the instruction, or shows a sample photo with a white band at the bottom, it applies to you.

So read the photograph section of your own notice, for this year. Look for the words "name" and "date of photograph", and for a sample picture. If the notice asks for the strip, add it. If it does not, leave the photo clean: a line of text nobody asked for is at best ignored and at worst a reason to send the form back.

What to print on the strip

Your name, as in the application. The spelling and order should match what you typed in the form, since the photo is checked against it. Most sample photos show the name in capitals, which is the default here; untick the box to print it as typed. A name typed in Hindi is printed in Hindi.

The date the photograph was taken. Not your date of birth, and not the date you are filling the form unless you took the photo that day. The date picker starts at today and will not go into the future. Under it, the page tells you how many days ago the chosen date was, which is the number to compare with the notice.

How the date is written. Day first is the convention on Indian forms, and 11-10-2026 is the default. Slashes, dots and a short month name (11 Oct 2026) are offered because sample photos differ. If the sample shows a word before the date, such as "Date:", type it in the box for that; otherwise leave it empty.

Two lines is the usual layout, name above date. One line is offered for a wide, short photo, at the cost of smaller letters.

How recent the photo must be

Many notices that mention a date also say how old the photo may be, and they say it in different ways. The NEET (UG) 2026 bulletin gives a fixed day: the photo must be taken after 1 January 2026. Others give a window, such as within a number of months of the application.

A date on the photo makes this easy for the checker to verify, so make sure it passes. If the date you would have to print is outside the window, the fix is a new photograph, not a different date. Printing a date on which the photo was not taken is a false statement on an application, and photos are compared with the candidate in person at later stages.

Under the photo or over it

The strip can go in two places, and which is better depends on whether the form fixes the pixel size.

No fixed size. Put the strip under the photo. The photo keeps every pixel and the picture comes out taller by the height of the strip. A 900 × 1,200 pixel photo with two lines at the default text size becomes 900 × 1,460.

A fixed size. The finished picture, strip included, is exactly the size you set, either way. The difference is what happens to the photo:

• Under shortens the photo's area to leave room. On a 276 × 354 pixel picture, two lines at the default size take a strip 79 pixels tall, a little over a fifth of the picture, and the photo fills the 275 pixels above it. The photo is scaled to cover that area and trimmed evenly at the sides.
• Over lays the strip across the bottom of the photo. The photo fills the whole picture and loses whatever was under the strip, which in a passport photo is shirt.

If the notice says the face must fill a set share of the photograph, over keeps the face larger, because the photo is not squeezed into a shorter area. If it shows a sample with a separate white band below the picture, under matches it.

Keeping the size and the KB limit

Choose the size the form states, or type it, and the result is exactly that many pixels. The sizes in the list are common ones: 3.5 × 4.5 cm is 276 × 354 pixels at 200 dots per inch and 413 × 531 at 300.

Then type the KB limit, if there is one. What happens next depends on the size setting:

• With a stated pixel size, the size is held and only the JPG quality is lowered until the file fits.
• With the photo's own size, the picture is made smaller as well if quality alone cannot reach the limit, and the page says so.

A "KB" limit is read strictly: a maximum of 50 KB is treated as 50,000 bytes, so the file passes whether the form counts 1,000 or 1,024 bytes to a KB.

Add the strip and set the size in one go, here. Adding the strip in one app and compressing in another saves the JPG twice, and the text is the first thing a second compression smudges.

Keeping the letters readable

The text size is set as a share of the picture's height, 7% by default. That is 25 pixels on a 354 pixel tall picture and 16 on a 230 pixel one. Letters that size are easy to read.

A long name is the usual problem. The name has to fit the width of the picture, so the tool shrinks it until it does. A forty-character name on a 276 pixel wide photo comes down to about 8 pixels, and at that size the page warns you. You then have three choices:

• raise the text size, which helps only until the width is the limit;
• use a larger pixel size, if the form allows a range;
• shorten what is printed to the form of the name the notice accepts, for example initials for middle names, if and only if the application itself uses that form.

Black text on a white strip is used because it survives JPG compression and photocopying. Coloured or shadowed text is not offered.

When something looks wrong

• The face is cut at the sides. The photo is a different shape from the size you chose. Crop it closer to that shape in your phone's gallery first, with the face in the middle.
• The photo is lying on its side. Use the Turn buttons under the file box.
• The download button is grey. There is nothing to print yet: type a name or pick a date.
• The file is over the limit by a little. Check that you typed the limit in KB, not MB. If the form gives a range such as 20 to 50 KB, type the upper figure.

What happens to your photo

The photo is opened, written on and saved inside your browser tab. It is not uploaded; this site has no place to receive it. The download is a new JPG made from the pixels alone, so the location and camera details stored in the original are not carried over. Your name and the date exist only in the picture you download.