There is no standard visa photo size
The single most repeated figure on the internet is 20 to 50 KB. It is real — it comes from Indian exam application forms — and it has been copied onto guides for countries that never published it.
The ten portals below disagree with each other by a factor of fifty on file size alone. Indonesia caps a photo at 200 KB. The United Kingdom allows 10 MB. Three of them reject a photo for being too small.
Every figure here was read from the authority that set it, and every row links to the page it came from with the date it was checked.
The requirements
| Portal | File size | Pixels | Shape | Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canada PR card / PR Portal | up to 4 MB | 715×1000 to 2000×2800 | — | JPG only |
| United Kingdom passport | at least 50 KB, up to 10 MB | at least 600×750 | — | — |
| United States visa (DS-160) | none published | 600×600 to 1200×1200 | must be square | — |
| New Zealand visa / NZeTA | at least 512 KB, up to 3.14 MB | none published | 3:4 portrait | JPG |
| Australia ImmiAccount | at least 70 KB | none published | — | — |
| Singapore ICA | up to 8 MB | 400×514 preferred | — | JPG, PNG, HEIC |
| Pakistan passport | up to 5 MB | none published | — | — |
| Indonesia SSCASN | up to 200 KB | none published | — | JPG |
| Kenya eTA (reported) | up to 293 KB | none published | — | — |
| India SSC exams — signature | 10–20 KB | none published | — | JPG |
The five traps in that table
1. Three portals set a MINIMUM. Australia 70 KB, the UK 50 KB, and New Zealand 512 KB. Every generic guide tells you to compress as hard as you can, and doing that guarantees rejection at all three. New Zealand's floor is seven times the next highest we found anywhere. Why photos get rejected for being too small covers this one properly.
2. A published pixel figure is often a range, not a target. The United States accepts anything from 600×600 to 1200×1200. Canada accepts 715×1000 through 2000×2800. Tools that resize to a single "correct" number are solving a problem that does not exist, and a checker comparing your file to one figure would tell you a perfectly valid photo is wrong.
3. Format is a real rejection cause and almost nobody checks it. Canada accepts JPG only. A correctly sized PNG fails. Renaming the file does not help, because the portal reads the bytes inside it rather than the name on the end.
4. Singapore accepts HEIC, which is unusual enough to be worth knowing if you are uploading straight from an iPhone. Almost every other portal does not, and converting it first is the fix.
5. India's SSC exams have no photo upload at all. The 20–50 KB photo figure that circulates for SSC is obsolete and actively dangerous: the application captures your photograph live through your camera, and the 2026 notice states that applications where a pre-existing photograph was held up to the camera will be rejected. Only the signature is uploaded, at 10–20 KB. This is the single clearest example of vendor advice causing the failure it claims to prevent.
Kenya is marked differently, on purpose
Kenya's eTA publishes no photo specification. The 293 KB figure comes from travellers quoting the message the portal gave them, so it is labelled reported rather than official throughout this site.
It is worth knowing anyway, because Kenya reports an oversized photo as a "network error" — so people spend an evening debugging their internet connection instead of their file.
What no list can tell you
Every figure above is something measurable in the file. None of them are the most common reasons a photo is rejected, which are the photograph itself: head size and position, background colour, shadows and glare, expression, and whether you have photographed a printed photo rather than supplying a digital one.
Each authority publishes its own rules on those, and the source links above go to the pages that state them. Read the one that applies to you — it takes a minute, and the file rules are the easy half.
Check your photo against any of these
Check my photo measures your file against the portal you choose and tells you which of these rules it breaks, in your browser, without uploading it.