SSC CGL photo and signature size: what the portal accepts (and what changed)

If you filled an SSC form a few years ago, the process has changed in a way that catches people out: you no longer upload a photograph at all. The SSC application portal now captures it live from your webcam or phone camera while you register. The only image file you actually prepare and upload is your signature — and it has to land inside a narrow 10–20 KB window as a JPEG.

That narrow window is where the trouble is. A phone photo of your signature is 2–4 MB. A screenshot of it is 200 KB. A scan saved as PNG is 80 KB. None of those will go through, and the portal’s error message (“file size should be between 10 KB and 20 KB”) doesn’t tell you how to get there. This guide does.

The rules, in one table

Item	Format	File size	Dimensions	Other rules
Photograph	Live capture in the form	Set by the portal	Face fills the on-screen frame	Plain background; no cap, mask, or spectacles
Signature	JPEG / JPG	10–20 KB	140 × 60 px preferred (≈ 4 × 2 cm)	Black ink, white paper, running hand — not block capitals

These are the specifications reported for the SSC CGL 2026 cycle. SSC publishes the authoritative version inside each exam’s notification PDF and in the on-screen instructions of the application module. If the form in front of you says something different, the form wins.

Why SSC moved to live photo capture

Impersonation. For years, exam-centre staff compared a printed admit-card photo (often years old, often heavily edited) against the person in front of them. Capturing the photo inside the application, with the candidate’s own camera and a timestamp, gives SSC an image that is recent by definition and hard to substitute. It also removes the single most common reason applications used to bounce — a photo that failed the size, background, or date-stamp rule.

The practical consequences for you:

• Do it on a device with a decent camera in daylight. Laptop webcams in a dim room produce grainy captures that can fail a later face-match at the centre.
• Sit in front of a plain, light wall. The rule says “plain background”; a cluttered bookshelf or a patterned curtain is the fastest way to be asked to retake.
• Remove caps, masks, and glasses. SSC lists all three explicitly. Religious head coverings that leave the full face visible are generally accepted; anything that shadows the face is not.
• Match your look on exam day. The notification warns that your appearance at the venue must match the captured photo. If you shave a beard off or grow one between application and exam, expect questions.

Because the photo is captured live, there is nothing to compress or resize for it. Every “SSC photo resizer” tool you’ll find online is solving a problem that no longer exists for CGL, CHSL, MTS, and GD applicants.

Preparing the signature file

This is the part that actually needs a tool, and it’s a three-step job: sign, capture, and shrink to the window.

1. Sign it properly

Use a black ballpoint or gel pen on plain white, unlined paper. Sign the way you always sign — SSC rejects signatures written in capital letters because they’re trivially forgeable and don’t match how you’ll sign the attendance sheet. Sign inside an imaginary box about 4 cm wide and 2 cm tall; that keeps the proportions right for the 140 × 60 px target so nothing gets squashed.

2. Capture it

A flatbed scanner at 200 dpi is ideal but not necessary. A phone photo taken straight down (not at an angle) in good light works fine. Then crop tightly — the crop should hug the ink with only a few millimetres of white margin. Every centimetre of blank paper you leave in the frame is file size you’ll have to squeeze out of the signature itself later.

3. Hit 10–20 KB

Open the Compress Image to 20 KB tool and drop the cropped file in. It searches JPEG quality settings automatically until the output is just under 20 KB, downscaling the dimensions only if quality alone can’t get there. Check two things on the result card:

• Size is at least 10 KB. If your crop is very small or very clean, the output may land at 6–8 KB, which the portal will reject for being too small. Fix: use the Image Resizer first to set the signature to about 300 × 130 px, then compress — the extra pixels bring the file up into the window.
• The signature is still legible. Zoom the preview. Thin pen strokes are the first thing JPEG compression eats. If the strokes look broken, re-sign with a slightly thicker pen and try again.

Your file never leaves your device during any of this; the compression runs in the browser tab. For a document you’ll use to sit a government exam, that’s worth knowing.

Mistakes that get signatures rejected

Uploading a PNG. The portal accepts JPEG/JPG only. Screenshots and many scanner defaults are PNG. The compressor above outputs JPEG regardless of what you feed it.

Signature in capitals. Rejected at the verification stage even if the file passes the upload check.

Blue ink. Some SSC notifications say black ink specifically; others don’t state a colour. Black is safe everywhere.

A photo of the signature at an angle. The portal shows your signature in a 140 × 60 box; a perspective-skewed image looks smeared. Shoot straight down.

Leaving the file name as IMG_2041 (1).jpg. Not a hard rule, but a plain signature.jpg avoids the occasional upload glitch with parentheses and spaces.

If you’re applying for other SSC exams

The photo-capture rule and the signature window are shared across SSC’s major recruitments — CGL, CHSL, MTS, GD Constable, CPO, JE, Stenographer — because they all run through the same application module. Always read the “How to apply” section of the specific notification, but the preparation above is identical.

Checklist before you press Upload

• Signature is a JPEG, between 10 and 20 KB.
• Cropped tight, black ink, white background, running hand.
• Roughly 140 × 60 px (2:1 ratio); still readable when zoomed.
• File named simply, e.g. signature.jpg.
• Photo captured live in the form: plain wall, good light, no cap/mask/glasses.