Drop your photo — including an iPhone HEIC, which ACT’s format list doesn’t include — and get a JPEG comfortably under the official 5 MB cap at the best quality that fits. Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
Unlike the SAT, whose official page publishes no numbers at all, ACT's photo-submission-requirements page states a concrete file spec: you can upload a JPG, JPEG, PNG, or BMP file, the maximum file size is 5 MB, and the photo must be at least 640 × 480 pixels. If you scan a paper photo, the scan must print as a 2″ × 2″ image or larger and be cropped to head and shoulders before upload. The forums and prep blogs that quote 5 MB and 640×480 are, for once, quoting real numbers — we verified them on the official page (which carries the 2026–2027 deadline table, so it's current). This page presets a 4.5 MB target with no exact dimensions; both choices are explained below.
First: HEIC isn't on it. iPhones save photos as HEIC by default, and a student who emails themselves a photo or plugs the phone in often ends up staring at an IMG_1234.HEIC that ACT's format list doesn't cover. That's the actual task for most people on this page — not shrinking, converting. Drop the HEIC straight in here: PixFit decodes it in your browser and gives back a JPEG that's on ACT's list and under its cap. (The other route — Settings › Camera › Formats › Most Compatible — only fixes photos you take from then on.) Second, a bit of trivia with a practical edge: ACT accepts BMP but not GIF, while the SAT accepts GIF but not BMP. If you're registering for both tests, one JPEG satisfies both lists — another reason JPEG is the safe answer everywhere.
The same page requires a portrait (not landscape) photo that is correctly oriented — and careful readers will notice that “640 x 480”, read as width × height, describes a landscape shape. The sensible reading, and the one this page takes: treat 640×480 as a resolution floor (your photo should comfortably exceed both numbers) and keep the portrait framing, which is what every acceptable-photo example on ACT's page shows. Any phone photo taken holding the phone upright clears the floor by a mile. “Correctly oriented” matters more than it sounds: a photo that displays sideways because the rotation lives only in EXIF metadata is a classic upload failure — PixFit bakes the rotation into the pixels when it re-encodes, so what you see is what the form gets.
File format is the easy half. ACT's page devotes most of its length to what's in the frame: a clear image of only you (not blurry or grainy) against a plain background, a full face-and-shoulders shot squarely facing the camera, no dark glasses, and — the rule with a distinctly 2020s flavour — the photo cannot be enhanced in any way: the page names lenses, filters, text, emoji and stickers specifically. A head covering worn daily for religious reasons is fine, adjusted to show the full face. Two more traps the page calls out: don't scan your driver's license or school ID (the scan won't be sharp enough to pass), and don't submit a photo of a photo. The rejected examples ACT shows are all mundane failures — too dark, too light, busy background, face too small, face too close, blurry, face behind hair and a hand. A fresh phone photo against a plain wall in daylight beats all of them.
This is the highest-stakes part of the page. Your photo must be added by the photo upload deadline for your test date — in the 2026–2027 table that's about five days before each Saturday test date, by midnight Central time. Miss it and the consequences are spelled out bluntly: the registration is cancelled, you are not admitted to test, and the registration fee is not refunded. You also can't print your admission ticket until the photo is on file. So upload the photo when you register, not the week of the test — if it's later flagged as unacceptable, you want days in hand to replace it, not hours. (Students whose religious beliefs prohibit photographs can call ACT to arrange an exception — the page asks that this happen by the regular registration deadline.)
The cap is 5 MB, and a modern phone photo is a 3–12 MB file — so plenty of photos need shrinking, and “5MB” is ambiguous in a way that occasionally bites: some systems count 5,000,000 bytes, others 5,242,880. A 4.5 MB target passes both readings, and for a head-and-shoulders portrait the quality difference from the original is invisible — PixFit binary-searches the encoder for the best quality that fits and keeps your full resolution whenever it can, so the 640×480 floor is never in danger. Dimensions are left empty deliberately: ACT publishes a minimum, not a target size, and its uploader isn't asking for an exact crop. If you want a tidy portrait crop anyway, type one into the exact-size box — the draggable crop preview keeps your head centred and both shoulders in frame.
Worth knowing before you pick a picture: the photo prints on your admission ticket and on the score report automatically sent to your high school, and test-centre staff compare it to you and to your photo ID at the door — so it must match how you look on test day. The requirements — with ACT's own examples of acceptable and rejected photos and the full deadline table — are on the official page: act.org › The ACT › Registration › Photo Submission Requirements. A registration photo travels with a teenager's name and school, so it shouldn't detour through a resizer's server: PixFit re-encodes entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and the re-encode strips EXIF metadata (including GPS) as a side effect. Registering for the SAT too? See the SAT photo page — same idea, oddly fewer rules. Law school on the horizon? The LSAT photo page takes GIF but not BMP — the mirror image of this list. Or see the full verified table.