Drop your photo, get a JPEG inside ICAI’s 20–50 KB window — the published spec for CA Foundation, Intermediate and Final exam forms, minimum size included via spec-valid padding. Everything runs in your browser; nothing leaves your device.
The photo and signature on a CA exam form come from your Self Service Portal profile, and ICAI publishes the spec in its own “Requirements for Applying” announcement each cycle. The current documents — one for Final November 2026, one for Foundation & Intermediate September 2026 — state identical numbers. Photograph: jpg/jpeg, 20–50 KB, colour or black-and-white, about 80% face visible including ears (no face mask), white background with clear contrast, straight relaxed face, no caps or goggles (spectacles are fine; religious headwear is allowed if it doesn’t cover the face), no red-eye, no selfies, cropped tight with no extra white space, and sized to fit a 4.5 × 3.5 cm frame. This page has PixFit preset to a 48 KB target with a 20 KB floor — 49,152 bytes, under “50 KB” whichever way a server counts kilobytes, and never below the minimum — at 413×531 pixels, which is exactly 3.5 × 4.5 cm at the 300 DPI label the file is written with. ICAI publishes no pixel rule — the centimetre frame is the whole geometric spec — so treat the pixel figure as a sensible shape, not an official number. Drop your photo, adjust the crop, download, upload to SSP.
“20–50 KB” and “10–20 KB” are windows, not caps: a file below the minimum fails validation just like an oversized one. That trips up two groups — people who run a photo through a generic compressor (which only pushes size down), and people who reuse a photo that’s been through WhatsApp or a screenshot, which is often already under 20 KB. PixFit treats the minimum as part of the spec: if the best-quality encode lands under the floor, the file is brought up to it with spec-valid padding that every image parser ignores — the picture doesn’t get worse to get bigger.
ICAI’s signature spec: sign on a white sheet with a black pen, scan or photograph it, crop tight, and save as jpg/jpeg between 10 and 20 KB, shaped to fit 6 × 2 cm — a wide 3:1 box. No pixel dimensions are published for it either; something like 600×200 keeps the shape. Drop a photo of your signed paper on this page with the size field set to 600x200 and the target moved to 19 KB with a 10 KB minimum — or use the signature tool, whose cleanup mode finds the ink, trims to it, and whitens the paper. One honest caution: make it your usual running-hand signature — it’s printed on exam materials and compared against what you sign at the centre, so a stylised one-off invites mismatch questions.
The exam announcement is explicit: candidates whose photo or signature is missing or not of printable quality must upload or change it on the Self Service Portal before filling the exam form. And ICAI’s own guidance notes list “profile changes submitted but not yet approved (name, photo, sign…)” as a standing helpdesk category — a changed photo isn’t live until ICAI approves it. So do this days before the form window opens, not the last evening: a pending approval with the deadline clock running is the avoidable version of this problem. It’s worth the care — the photo and signature you upload are printed on your admit card and marksheets, documents you’ll be showing people for years.
For the September & November 2026 exams, forms ran 6–19 July 2026 (late fee to 22 July, correction window 23–25 July, IST) per ICAI’s Important Dates — that window has closed. The spec, though, is the stable part: the same numbers appear cycle after cycle, exam form windows recur at eservices.icai.org with each session, and SSP accepts photo/signature updates year-round — new students hit the same 20–50 KB wall at registration. Fix the files once, properly, and the next form is a formality.
A dedicated “ICAI CA photo resizer” ranking for this search says the signature must be “2 × 4.5 cm under 20 KB” — a box that appears nowhere in ICAI’s documents (it’s the photo’s 4.5 × 3.5 frame, mangled) with the 10 KB floor silently dropped — and calls the photo “strictly under 50 KB”, dropping the 20 KB floor that’s half the spec. ICAI’s own words: photo 20–50 KB in a 4.5 × 3.5 cm frame, signature 10–20 KB from a 6 × 2 cm box. If the SSP screen in front of you says something different, believe the portal — over resizer sites, and over this page too.
Exam announcements live at icai.org; the form and your profile live at eservices.icai.org (SSP). A photo tied to your CA registration number has no business passing through a resizer’s server: PixFit re-encodes entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded anywhere — and the re-encode strips EXIF metadata (including GPS) as a side effect. An iPhone HEIC drops straight in; the output is an SSP-ready JPEG. The same 20–50 KB photo window shows up on the IBPS/SBI bank-exam page (which adds a 200×230 pixel rule), and fellow-traveller exams have their own pages: CAT, XAT — or start from the full verified table.
Spec source: ICAI’s own “Requirements for Applying” announcements for the Final November 2026 and Foundation & Intermediate September 2026 exams, plus the matching Guidance Notes and Important Dates documents, all published at icai.org and read July 2026. These numbers recur but can change — if the SSP upload screen disagrees, believe the portal.