Drop your photo (or your passport bio-page shot), get a JPEG comfortably under the Djibouti eVisa portal’s 250 Kb per-file cap at the best quality that fits. Everything runs in your browser — the file never leaves your device.
Djibouti's eVisa runs on the National Police's own platform, evisa.gouv.dj (“the official website of the immigration directorate of the Republic of Djibouti”), and its application form publishes exactly three file rules of its own: the photograph must be JPG or PNG, other documents (passport copy, ticket, hotel booking or invitation letter) may be JPG, PNG or PDF, and “the size of each file should not exceed 250 Kb” — one cap covering every upload in the application. No pixel dimensions, no DPI, no background rule and no minimum size appear anywhere in the portal's own text. This page presets a 240 KB target: the portal's code enforces the cap as 250,000 bytes exactly, and a 240 KB output (245,760 bytes) stays under it in every way a computer might count kilobytes. Since there is no minimum, nothing ever needs padding.
A typical modern phone photo is 2–4 MB — ten to fifteen times over this cap — so virtually every applicant has to shrink every file, and the usual “send it to yourself on WhatsApp” trick is quality roulette. PixFit binary-searches the encoder so each file comes out at the best quality that still fits under the cap, deterministically, keeping full resolution whenever it fits. The batch mode takes the photograph, passport shot, ticket and hotel confirmation in one drop and hands back a compliant set. One format detail from the portal's own upload code: the photograph slot checks both the file extension and the image type — JPG/JPEG/PNG only, so an iPhone HEIC won't pass. Drop the HEIC here instead; PixFit decodes it in your browser and returns a JPEG under the cap.
Search results for this spec are a museum of invented numbers. A lookalike agency domain sells “JPEG only, minimum 10 KB, maximum 1 MB, minimum 350×350 pixels” — follow that advice and a 1 MB photo is rejected by the real portal's 250,000-byte check, four times over the actual cap. Others sell “2×2 inch, white background”, “1200×1200 pixels at 600 DPI”, or “600×600 to 1200×1200 pixels” — that last one is the square US DS-160 visa spec pasted onto Djibouti wholesale. None of those figures appear in the portal's strings. This page deliberately presets no exact dimensions: a normal passport-style portrait — recent, front-facing, plain light background, head and shoulders filling most of the frame — is the sensible target, and if the upload screen in front of you states specific numbers, the portal wins.
The 250 Kb rule applies to your passport bio-page copy, your ticket or reservation, and your hotel booking or invitation letter alike — and the passport page is usually the harder squeeze, because a sharp photo of a document compresses far worse than a face on a plain background. Drop it in the same way, but don't crop away the edges of the page to save bytes, and check that the two machine-readable lines at the bottom stay legible after compression; if they've gone soft, re-shoot flatter and closer rather than compressing harder. Two content rules from the portal worth knowing: the invitation letter must contain your host's contacts (phone, email), and a transit visa needs your onward ticket or next-destination visa attached in the same flow.
If you've seen “2 MB, jpg/jpeg/png/pdf” quoted for Djibouti, that rule is real but belongs to the visa-extension flow inside an existing account — a separate attachment slot with its own limit. The initial application's uploads are all capped at 250 Kb. (Extensions themselves, per the portal: your visa needs at least 48 hours of remaining validity to apply, via the immigration office or immigration@evisa.dj.)
Facts from the portal's own text: you need a passport valid at least 6 months, a flight reservation (or other means of transport), an accommodation address, an invitation letter with contacts where applicable, and a Visa, Mastercard or American Express card; the fee carries 10% VAT and is non-refundable once paid; an application left unpaid for over a week is cancelled; and after payment you wait for approval, then download the e-visa as a PDF — paying does not by itself guarantee approval. The ordinary (short-notice) visa is meant for arrivals within days of applying — the portal's own English text garbles the exact figure (“within three (6) days”), so read the screen in front of you.
The official application platform is evisa.gouv.dj — type the address rather than clicking an ad; agency lookalikes file the same form at a markup and are the source of the worst invented specs above. And a visa photo travels with your passport details, 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. For the neighbourhood's formats, see the Ethiopia e-Visa and Saudi eVisa pages, or the full verified table.
Spec source: the portal's own application text and upload-validation code at evisa.gouv.dj, as read July 2026. These numbers change — if the portal's upload screen disagrees, believe the portal.