Drop your photo, get a JPEG under the evisa.gov.et 2 MB cap — the upload format for every Ethiopian e-Visa type. The compression runs in your browser; the photo never leaves your device.
Ethiopia's official e-Visa portal (evisa.gov.et, Immigration and Citizenship Service) enforces one file rule at the upload step: JPEG, JPG or PNG, smaller than 2 MB. The requirement text asks for a recent passport-size photo of the applicant, in colour. Those rules come from the portal's own upload code and its on-page notes — the exact rejection message is “Invalid size, Please upload file size of maximum 2MB!”. This page is preset just under that cap: if your photo is already a JPEG under 2 MB, upload the original to the portal untouched and close this tab; if it's a 5–10 MB phone photo or an iPhone HEIC, drop it here and PixFit gives you the best-quality JPEG that fits, at full resolution when possible.
The portal's code rejects anything over 2,000,000 bytes (decimal megabytes). Windows Explorer reports sizes in binary megabytes, so a file it shows as “1.96 MB” can actually be about 2,055,000 bytes — over the portal's line while looking under it. If an upload is rejected for size when your file manager says it's fine, that's why. This page presets a 1900 KB target (1,945,600 bytes), which is under the limit in every unit convention.
Search results for this spec are full of confident, mutually contradictory numbers: one resizer site sells 35×45 mm / 827×1063 pixels at 600 DPI, another says 30×40 mm, and a third says 600×600 pixels under 240 KB — that last one is the US DS-160 visa spec pasted in wholesale. The official portal publishes none of these. Its only shape guidance is “recent passport-size photo”, so a normal portrait-orientation passport-style photo is what's expected — there is no pixel count to hit, which is why this page deliberately presets no Exact size. There is also no minimum file size, so nothing needs padding. As always: if the upload screen in front of you shows different numbers, the portal wins.
The upload page's notes say the image must be “clear and readable” and that an image “with blurred or unclean background is not acceptable”, alongside an official photograph-tips example. Note the official wording is clean, not white — guides demanding strictly white are stricter than the source, though a plain light background is obviously the safe choice. No file tool can fix composition: if your photo is blurry, shadowed, or taken against a cluttered wall, retake it rather than compressing it harder.
The application also requires a scanned colour copy of your passport, valid for at least six months from your intended entry date — uploaded under the same JPEG/JPG/PNG under-2 MB rule (PDF is accepted for other supporting documents). Photograph or scan the bio page flat, in even light, with no glare across the machine-readable zone at the bottom — “clear and readable” applies to this upload with full force, and an unreadable passport copy is a classic rejection reason. If a high-resolution scan lands over the cap, the same tool above brings it under while keeping it legible.
Two timing rules worth knowing from the portal's own notices: e-Visa fees are not refundable, and the visa's validity runs from your intended arrival date as entered on the application, not from the date it's issued — so get the date right the first time. Citizens of all countries are eligible to apply online for the tourist e-Visa. Give your photo and passport scan a final look against the portal's example images before paying.
The only official application site is evisa.gov.et — the space around it is crowded with agency and lookalike sites charging a markup on the same form, so type the address rather than clicking an ad. 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. An iPhone HEIC can be dropped straight in — it comes out as a JPEG the portal accepts. For other countries' formats, see the India e-Visa, Vietnam e-Visa and Thailand e-Visa pages, or the full verified table.