Drop your residency headshot — or an iPhone HEIC — and get a 750×1050 JPEG that reads exactly 2.5×3.5 inches at 300 dpi and lands under ERAS’s 150 KB cap. Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
The ERAS photo spec is split across two authorities, and which one applies to you depends on where you went to medical school. US graduates upload their own photo in the MyERAS portal, and AAMC's user guide publishes the entire file spec in three lines: JPG/JPEG or PNG, maximum 150 KB, face centered. That's it — no pixel dimensions, no dpi, no colour requirement on today's page. International medical graduates can't upload directly: ECFMG places the photo into ERAS for you, and its spec is stricter in two ways — the file must be JPEG (PNG isn't on ECFMG's list), and it must be “no larger than 2.5 by 3.5 inches”. Fellowship applicants route through a third body, the EFDO — whose upload instructions AAMC links to at an address that currently returns a 404, so this page sticks to the two specs we could actually read. One JPEG under 150 KB satisfies every route; that's what the preset produces.
A JPEG doesn't have inches; it has pixels, plus a small metadata field saying how many pixels to print per inch. ECFMG's 2.5 × 3.5-inch rule therefore lives in that metadata: the same 750 × 1050-pixel file reads as 2.5 × 3.5 inches at 300 dpi and as 10.4 × 14.6 inches at 72 dpi — identical pixels, different label. Most phone photos ship with 72 dpi in that field, which is exactly how a perfectly good headshot can read as “larger than 2.5 × 3.5 inches”. The preset here re-encodes to 750 × 1050 pixels and writes 300 dpi into the file, so it reads exactly 2.5 × 3.5 inches — the portrait shape the whole headshot industry cuts for ERAS. A US grad uploading via MyERAS faces no published dimension rule at all: if you prefer your own framing, clear the dimensions box and PixFit will only handle the 150 KB part. One aside: ECFMG glosses 2.5 × 3.5 as “passport size”, but an actual US passport photo is a 2 × 2 square — the gloss means the upright shape, so don't reuse a literal passport-photo crop expecting a match.
Both routes cap the file at 150 KB, and it's a genuinely small budget: a modern phone portrait is 2–4 MB, fifteen to twenty-five times over. Export tools that only offer a quality slider make you guess your way down; PixFit binary-searches the encoder for the highest quality that still fits, so you get the best image 150 KB can hold at the target size. The preset reads 150 KB the strict way — 150,000 bytes — so the output passes whether the portal counts a kilobyte as 1,000 or 1,024 bytes. At 750 × 1050 that budget is comfortable: head-and-shoulders portraits against a plain background compress well, and the result survives the interview-day printout it exists for.
MyERAS takes JPG or PNG; ECFMG takes JPEG only. If you're an IMG and your photographer delivered a PNG, it needs converting, not renaming — a file's extension is a label, not its format, and a renamed PNG is still a PNG inside. The same goes double for HEIC, the iPhone camera default, which appears on neither official list: drop it straight in here and PixFit decodes it in your browser and hands back a genuine JPEG. ECFMG's page is blunt about the alternative: “We are unable to modify files for applicants” — rejected files simply have to be fixed and resubmitted. This page is that fix, free and running entirely on your own machine.
Because residency photos are a business, the top search results for “ERAS photo requirements” are photography studios — and their spec sheets disagree with each other and with the official pages. Circulating claims we checked against both current sources: a 150 dpi requirement (appears on neither page — and dpi is the adjustable metadata explained above), “must be in color” (neither page says so), a 100 KB cap (the published number is 150 KB on both), and a 150 × 200-pixel minimum (no minimum is published anywhere). A professional photo is a reasonable thing to pay for; the file-spec part of the service is not — it's a re-encode your own browser can do. Bring their JPEG here if it bounces.
ECFMG states the two uses plainly: programs use the photograph to identify you at the interview and as a memory aid when creating a rank order list. That second use is worth a beat: months after your interview, this thumbnail is what surfaces next to your name at rank time. The content bar is ordinary — a clear, full front view of head and shoulders, face centered, natural expression, eyes open, looking directly ahead — but it rewards a photo that still reads at small size: plain background, even light, good contrast. AAMC adds one mechanical warning: the photo is assigned per program, and once assigned to a program you've applied to, it can't be unassigned — so finalize the picture before you start assigning it.
The IMG route has latency the deadline-week uploader should know about: a photo submitted via MyIntealth transmits to your MyERAS application within 24 hours — it isn't instant, so don't leave it for the night applications open. If the file is rejected, the round-trip repeats with a corrected file. You can replace the photo at any time (the new version supersedes the old), and if you re-apply next season, photographs are on ECFMG's list of reusable documents — stored and re-uploaded to the new season's application within about five business days of registering your token. Fitting the file correctly once is genuinely a multi-season investment.
The official pages are the AAMC MyERAS user guide's Photo chapter and the Photograph section of ECFMG's ERAS supporting-documents index. A residency photo travels with your name, your school and your entire application file, so it shouldn't detour through a resizer's server: PixFit re-encodes in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and the re-encode strips EXIF metadata (including GPS) as a side effect. IMGs usually have a matching second task — the US visa photo (DS-160) for the J-1 has its own square spec. Writing NBEMS exams in India instead? See NEET PG and FMGE. Or browse the full verified table.