Guide · rebuilt 24 October 2026
Make scans upright for form uploads
Recruitment, bank and visa portals ask for a photograph, a signature, a thumb impression or a handwritten declaration as a small JPEG inside a narrow size window. The commonest reason one is rejected by the person checking it is not the size: it is that the picture arrived on its side or upside down. This guide is the whole job in order — orientation, skew, edges, then size — and why the order matters.
Why a portal shows it sideways
A phone stores a photo the way its sensor saw it and adds a tag saying how to turn it for display. The phone’s own gallery reads the tag; many portals resize the upload with software that ignores it and show the stored pixels. So the signature that is upright on your phone is sideways on the verifier’s screen. The fix is a file whose pixels are upright and which carries no tag at all — a baked file — because every decoder agrees with it. Rewriting the tag alone is not enough for a portal, since the portal may not read it.
The order that works
- Turn first. Make the text or the signature the right way up with a quarter turn.
- Then remove the skew. It is measured along the rows of writing, which only run across once the page is upright.
- Keep every edge. Fill the corners white rather than cropping: a seal, a date or the tail of a signature near the edge is worth more than a tidy rectangle.
- Last, fit the size window. Turning re-encodes the file, so its kilobytes change; check them after, not before.
How well the skew and direction are read
The scan straightener measures skew from the rows of text and reads the direction from the writing itself. It was run on 24 October 2026 on generated A4-proportioned pages (typed Latin text and a Devanagari page) at known angles, and on one of this site’s photographs:
| Test page | Skew measured | Direction suggested |
|---|---|---|
| Typed page, skewed +2.5°, upright | +2.50° | upright (0°) |
| Same page, then turned 90° clockwise | +2.50° | turn 90° anticlockwise |
| Same page, then turned 180° | +2.50° | turn 180° |
| Typed page, skewed −3.2°, turned 270° | −3.20° | turn 90° clockwise |
| Devanagari page, skewed +1.5°, turned 180° | +1.50° | turn 180° |
| A photograph of a landscape | none (not a page) | none offered |
Sixteen of sixteen test pages were read correctly, including all four quarter turns at three skews. Real scans are messier — handwriting, stamps, photographs pasted onto forms — and a page with too few clear lines gets no direction suggestion at all rather than a guess.
Size windows, with their sources
These are the profiles on the upright for upload page. Portals change their numbers with each notification; the notice you are applying under always wins.
| Document | Window | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Photograph · IPPB recruitment | 200 × 230 px · 20–50 KB · JPEG | Official, read 2026-10-18 |
| Signature · IPPB recruitment | 140 × 60 px · 10–20 KB · JPEG | Official, read 2026-10-18 |
| Left thumb impression · IPPB recruitment | 240 × 240 px · 20–50 KB · JPEG | Official, read 2026-10-18 |
| Handwritten declaration · IPPB recruitment | 800 × 400 px · 50–100 KB · JPEG | Official, read 2026-10-18 |
| Visa application photo · Indian visa (online application) | square, 350–1000 px a side · 10–300 KB · JPEG | Official, read 2026-10-18 |
| Signature · SSC CGL | about 2:1 · 10–20 KB · JPEG | Unverified — confirm on the official portal |
| Photograph · UPSC | each side 350–1000 px · 20–300 KB · JPEG | Unverified — confirm on the official portal |
| Signature (signed three times) · UPSC | each side 350–1000 px · 20–300 KB · JPEG | Unverified — confirm on the official portal |
When the file is too small or too big
- Too big: JPEG quality comes down first (to no lower than 60), then the picture shrinks in the same shape. Both are stated.
- Too small, and the notice allows a larger picture: it is enlarged in the same shape until it reaches the minimum.
- Too small, and the size is fixed: the page says so. Padding a file with blank bytes to reach a number is not done — re-scan at 200 DPI or more.
- The wrong shape for the profile: it is fitted inside without padding and the page asks you to crop it to the shape first.