PAN Card Photo Resize

Your PAN photo came back rejected, or the size quoted on one page disagrees with the next. Much of the confusion has a plain cause: two agencies take PAN applications online, each with its own upload rules, and since April 2026 the printed form asks for a photo of yet another size. This page sets out what each source says, in its own words where the wording matters, and how the presets above meet it.

Two agencies, two sets of rules

Two agencies take PAN applications online: Protean eGov Technologies, formerly NSDL e-Gov, and UTIITSL. Each runs its own online form with its own limits for the photograph and the signature. Choose the preset for the agency whose website you are applying on. A photo made to UTIITSL's 30 KB limit can be over Protean's 20 KB, and Protean's 197 × 276 px frame is a different shape from the square reported for UTIITSL. Protean, in turn, publishes two sets of limits, covered below.

What each source states

As read on 24 September 2026:

No official source states a minimum KB for a PAN photo or signature, and no Protean source states a size in pixels.

Protean's DSC table and its e-Sign guide

The DSC instructions on tin.tin.proteantech.in, the page for new PAN applications on Form 93 and Form 94, were last modified on 3 August 2026. Their table gives the photograph as 200 DPI, colour, JPEG, "Size Max. 20 KB", "Dimension 3.5X2.5 cms", and the signature as 200 DPI, colour, JPEG, "Max. 10 KB", "2X4.5 cms". Protean's page for change and correction requests carries the same table.

The e-Sign guide on proteantech.in, dated 16 April 2024, allows "Maximum file size: 50kB" for each image. It writes the sizes as 3.5(H) × 2.5(W) cm and 2(H) × 4.5(W) cm, which settles what the DSC table leaves open: the photo stands upright and the signature lies long. It also says "DPI lesser than 200 dpi". Read literally, that asks for less than 200, which a file at 200 DPI does not meet, while the DSC table states 200 DPI as the value. The guide predates Form 93 by almost two years.

The presets use the smaller limits, 20 KB for the photo and 10 KB for the signature, because a file within them is within both. The photo preset stops at 20,000 bytes, which is inside 20 KB however Protean counts a kilobyte and no more than two-fifths of the e-Sign guide's 50 kB; the signature preset stops at 10,000 bytes on the same principle. The DPI follows the DSC table's 200; the e-Sign guide's wording, read strictly, is the one point on which the presets do not match it.

At this pixel size the smaller limit cost nothing in our test. The portrait test photo came to 6,611 bytes at 95% quality, the top of the tool's range, which is a third of the 20,000 bytes allowed.

UTIITSL checks only the file

What UTIITSL's online form checks is written in its validation script, last modified on 1 July 2026. The photo check divides the file size by 1,024 and, if the result is over 30, shows "Photo size must be less than 30KB." The signature is rejected over 60 on the same count. Both checks allow only the extensions jpeg, jpg and png, and supporting documents go up as PDFs of up to 5 MB.

In bytes, the largest photo the check lets through is 30 × 1,024 = 30,720 and the largest signature 60 × 1,024 = 61,440, despite the message's "less than". The tool keeps the 30 KB maximum at 30,000 bytes or less, which the script reads as 29.30 KB at most.

The script checks no pixel size and no DPI. The 213 × 213 px at 300 DPI for the photo, and 400 × 200 px at 600 DPI in black and white for the signature, appear only on third-party sites describing UTIITSL's PSA cropping tool, such as uti.mypancenter.com in 2023, and in no UTIITSL text we could reach. The presets use those sizes and say in the tool that they are reported by third parties. Since the script looks only at size and extension, those pixel sizes neither help nor hurt there.

The printed Form 93 is not the upload

From 1 April 2026 the printed PAN application is Form 93, replacing Form 49A. It asks applicants to "affix two recent colour photographs with white backgrounds (size 4.5 cm x 3.5 cm)". Form 49A said 3.5 cm × 2.5 cm, and some official pages still show that older size.

The two figures answer different questions. The 4.5 × 3.5 cm is a printed photograph affixed to a paper form; the online upload size, in Protean's DSC table last modified in August 2026, is still 3.5 × 2.5 cm. For an upload, use the upload size. For the paper form, the prints are what count, and a file's KB does not come into it.

From centimetres to pixels

Protean gives centimetres, and a JPEG stores pixels. At the DSC table's 200 DPI, with 2.54 cm to an inch, pixels = cm ÷ 2.54 × DPI, rounded:

The DPI travels in the file's header as a label, and the Image Resizer in KB guide explains how a program turns it back into centimetres. At 200 DPI, 197 × 276 px measures 2.50 × 3.51 cm, the table's size to the nearest millimetre, which is why the Protean presets set the pixels and the DPI together. The same pixels labelled 300 DPI would measure only 1.67 × 2.34 cm.

What the presets produce

Each preset fixes the pixel size, so the tool never changes the pixel size to reach the KB; only the JPEG quality moves. We ran all four on test images we made, a portrait photo of 3,024 × 4,032 px and a phone-style photo of a signature:

The Protean signature came closest to its cap, at up to 79.3% of 10,000 bytes. A real photo will come out at a different size, but every test result left room under its cap.

Our portrait test photo is 3 wide to 4 high, a ratio of 0.75; Protean's frame is 0.714, a little narrower, and UTIITSL's is square. The photo presets start in Crop to fill, so move the photo under the frame until your face sits centrally; Fit whole photo keeps the edges of the picture but shrinks the face inside white margins.

A signature is never cropped into. By default the tool trims the empty paper and turns the paper white, and two tick boxes switch either off. It then fits the signature whole into its frame, 2.25 to 1 for Protean or 2 to 1 for UTIITSL, with white margins for any difference in shape. How trimming and whitening work is on the Signature Resize page.

Taking the photo and signing

Form 93 asks for recent colour photographs with white backgrounds, and Protean's DSC table specifies colour.

• Recent and in colour. A black-and-white photo does not meet the table's "Type Color".
• A plain white background, the colour Form 93 names for its printed photographs.
• Face straight on to the camera, without dark glasses.

Light and framing decide how much of a small file goes to your face, and the 20 KB guide covers both.

For the signature, Protean's checklist is direct: "Never sign on a patterned or coloured background. Use a plain white piece of paper and a black ink pen." Sign in your usual hand, in roughly the shape of the frame, and photograph the page flat, with the table and the page edges out of the picture.

Why a PAN upload gets rejected

Over Protean's limit on a thousand-byte count. Protean's table writes only "Max. 20 KB". A photo that another tool made 20 KB by the Windows reckoning holds 20,480 bytes, over the limit if the checker counts in thousands; this tool's Protean preset stops at 20,000. Why a kilobyte has two sizes is on the MB to KB converter page.

The other agency's file. A photo made with the UTIITSL preset can be up to 30,000 bytes and is square, so it may be over Protean's 20 KB and is not Protean's shape.

The wrong file type. Protean says JPEG and its e-Sign guide allows only the .jpg extension, so an iPhone HEIC photo or a PNG will not do as it is. The tool always saves a .jpg, such as IMG_1234-pan-protean-photo.jpg, a type both agencies list.

A signature on patterned or coloured paper. Protean's checklist rules it out, and a pattern can also mislead the tool's trimming, which looks for dark ink on light paper.

What this tool assumes

• Four presets: Protean's photo and signature from its DSC table, and UTIITSL's with limits from its form's own check and pixel sizes as third parties report them. "Another form" takes a maximum in KB and keeps the photo's shape.
• Each preset fixes the pixel size and writes its own DPI into the JPEG header, so only the JPEG quality moves to meet the limit. A maximum of X KB stops at X × 1,000 bytes.
• It makes the photo and signature only. Supporting documents are a separate upload; Protean's DSC table allows 300 KB a page.
• Nothing is sent to calci.in or anywhere else while the files are made, and the JPEGs you save carry no EXIF data.
• The tool is not affiliated with Protean, UTIITSL or the Income Tax Department. The specifications are as read on 24 September 2026; check the agency's current page before you upload.