Drop your photo, get a clean passport-style JPEG around 1 MB — a sensible upload size, not an official cap, because Kenya’s eTA portal doesn’t publish one. Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
Kenya's Electronic Travel Authorisation runs on etakenya.go.ke (Directorate of Immigration Services) and its official mobile app, and the requirement list on the portal's own How-to-Apply page says exactly this much about the photo: “Selfie or passport-type photo”. That's the whole spec. No pixel dimensions, no file-size cap, no background colour, no format list — we read the portal's public pages and walked into the live application form itself (abandoning the draft before submitting anything), and no photo numbers appear anywhere. This page presets a 1 MB target with no exact dimensions; both choices are explained below, and neither is an official number, because there aren't any.
The application's photo step is literally titled “Selfie or Photo”: the form can open your camera and capture the picture itself, with a face-outline overlay and a countdown, and the capture runs a face-detection check in your browser as it shoots. If that works for you, use it — there's nothing to resize. The upload path matters when the live capture doesn't cooperate: no camera on the machine you're applying from, a webcam that produces a dim smeary frame, or you simply have a proper passport-style photo already. In that case a normal passport-type portrait — recent, front-facing, plain light background, head and shoulders filling most of the frame — is the sensible target, and that's what this page helps you produce at a reasonable file size.
Search for “Kenya eTA photo size” and the confident figures pile up: one agency site states “207×207 pixels, file size should not exceed 300KB”, another calls “207px by 207px” the “preferred resolution”, a photo-tool site says “500x500 pixels”, a travel blog says the “system wants 270×270 pixels minimum” under 2 MB — and one guide manages to quote both 207×207 and a 500×500 minimum in the same article. None of these numbers appear on the official portal. The 207×207 / 300 KB pair looks like a leftover from Kenya's retired eVisa system, which the eTA replaced in January 2024 — copied forward from site to site ever since. If the upload screen in front of you ever states specific numbers, the portal wins; as of our check there are none to obey.
Before the photo step, the form asks you to “provide a photo or a scan of the biodata page on your passport” — and the upload control accepts .jpg, .jpeg, .png and .pdf (we read that from the live form, not from a guide). A flat, glare-free phone photo of the open passport page is fine; make sure the two machine-readable lines at the bottom stay sharp and legible. If you prefer to send a PDF, PixFit's PDF output mode turns that phone photo into a tidy one-page PDF at whatever size you set. Don't crop into the page edges to save bytes — the whole page should be visible.
With no published cap, the practical enemy is the opposite one: a modern phone photo is a 3–12 MB file, and we watched the form accept an absurdly large test file into its upload queue without a client-side complaint — which means nothing stops you from feeding it something that stalls on hotel Wi-Fi and dies at 0%. A ~1 MB JPEG is visually indistinguishable for a portrait, uploads fast on a bad connection, and is comfortably within anything a government upload service tolerates. That's a reliability choice, not compliance — there is no official number to comply with. Dimensions are left empty for the same reason: no pixel rule exists, so cropping to an invented square helps nobody. If you want a tidy square anyway, type one in — the draggable crop preview keeps the framing under your control. An iPhone HEIC drops straight in and comes out as a JPEG.
An honest note the resizer sites skip: since January 2024 a long list of nationalities doesn't need a Kenyan eTA at all. Citizens of the East African Community states (Burundi, DR Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda) are exempt for up to 180 days, and the portal's How-to-Apply page carries two further visa-exempt lists — a 90-day list spanning dozens of countries from Malaysia and Singapore to South Africa and Zimbabwe, and a 60-day list of other African states. The exemption search box sits right on the application's first screen. Two minutes there can save you the fee, the photo, and everything else on this page. Everyone else — including infants and children — needs an approved eTA before boarding; the portal quotes three working days of processing (“in some cases it may take longer”) and the authorisation is valid for travel within 90 days of issuance. Group applications cover up to 6 people.
The only official application channels are etakenya.go.ke and the official Kenya Travel Authorisation app — the space around them is dense with lookalike “Kenya eTA” sites charging a markup on the same form, and several of the invented photo specs above come from exactly those sites. Type the address rather than clicking an ad. And a travel photo rides along 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. Travelling on in the region? See the Tanzania eVisa, Uganda e-Visa, Rwanda visa and Ethiopia e-Visa pages, or the full verified table.