Drop your photo — including an iPhone HEIC, which LSAC’s format list doesn’t cover — and get a head-and-shoulders JPEG around 1 MB that clears LSAC’s unpublished file-size check. Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
The LSAT photo rules live in two official places, and we read both. The requirements page on lsac.org carries the content rules: a recent, recognizable photo of only you, facing the camera, head and shoulders in frame, facial features clearly visible with no shadows or obstructions, a plain background — and the photo must completely fill the 195 × 195 pixel photo box in your account. The photo-upload help page on JD Services (os.lsac.org) fills in the file spec through its error-message FAQ: accepted extensions are .jpg, .gif, or .png, minimum dimensions 195 × 195 pixels, resolution at least 72 pixels per inch — and there's a “This photo's file size is too large” error, for which no number is published anywhere. This page presets a 1 MB target with no exact dimensions; both choices are explained below.
Next to the ACT's 640×480 floor, LSAC's 195×195 minimum is almost quaint: any phone photo from the last decade clears it by a factor of twenty or more per side. It only bites when people upload a thumbnail — a picture saved from a chat app's preview, a website avatar, or a heavily-cropped corner of a group shot. Use an original off the phone and the dimension checks will never trouble you; LSAC's uploader even has its own crop-and-rotate tool for framing, which is why this page deliberately presets no exact pixel size. The opposite failure exists too — “This photo is too large” means the dimensions were too big for LSAC's system to auto-reduce, which mostly happens with high-resolution scans. The 1 MB re-encode here downscales those into range as a side effect.
Like College Board with the SAT, LSAC enforces a file-size limit it doesn't publish: the error message exists in the official FAQ, the number doesn't — not on the requirements page, not in the upload help. So the sensible play is the same as for the SAT: a modest file that sails through any plausible cap. The 1 MB preset is a reliability choice, not an official number — for a head-and-shoulders portrait that ends up displayed in a 195-pixel box, the difference from a 6 MB original is invisible, and PixFit binary-searches the encoder for the best quality that fits, keeping your full resolution whenever it can.
The accepted list is .jpg, .gif, or .png — the same GIF-not-BMP list as the SAT, and the mirror image of the ACT, which takes BMP but not GIF. One JPEG satisfies all three. Two things the official FAQ says that matter for iPhone users: HEIC — the iPhone camera default — isn't on the list, and renaming a file's extension causes an error; it must be converted. That second sentence is aimed straight at the oldest trick in the book: IMG_1234.HEIC renamed to .jpg is still a HEIC inside and will bounce (if not as an invalid type, then as “corrupt or damaged”). Drop the HEIC straight in here instead — PixFit decodes it in your browser and hands back a genuine JPEG that's on LSAC's list and under any sane cap.
The FAQ's resolution error says a low-resolution photo “will not display clearly when printed” and requires at least 72 pixels per inch. Worth demystifying: ppi is a metadata number written into the file, not a measure of sharpness — and virtually every phone and camera writes 72 ppi or higher by default, so almost nobody fails this check on a real photo. What actually makes a printed photo blurry is too few pixels overall, which is the 195×195 floor's job. A normal photo re-encoded here passes both: the pixel count stays comfortably high, and the output carries standard resolution metadata.
The requirement you won't find on the SAT or ACT pages: the photo you upload must be a different photo than the one on the government-issued ID you'll present at the test, and LSAC says explicitly not to scan or photograph that ID photo for upload. The two pictures are compared against each other and against your face at check-in — two independent likenesses are the point, so a fresh photo is required, and it must match how you look on test day. Otherwise the content bar is the familiar one: plain background, even light, no shadows across the face, nothing obscuring your features. LSAC also states it retains the photo only as long as needed to assure score authenticity and test integrity.
Two details betray the system's paper ancestry. The upload preview shows your photo in color and in black-and-white — because the LSAT Admission Ticket may come out of whatever printer you have, and LSAC wants you to check the photo survives grayscale (strong contrast with the background helps). And one of the rejected-example captions on the requirements page still tells you to fill “the 2x2 box” — the old two-inch printed square that the 195-pixel box replaced — while the visible text says 195px. The practical takeaway from both: your photo will be judged small and possibly gray, so favour a plain background and clear contrast over artistic lighting.
The official pages are lsac.org › LSAT › LSAT Photo Requirements (with example photos of what passes and what doesn't) and the photo-upload help inside JD Services. The upload FAQ repeats four separate times that “LSAC cannot offer assistance editing your photos” — that assistance is exactly what this page is, free and running entirely on your own machine. A registration photo travels with your name, date of birth and law-school 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. Took the SAT or ACT on the way here? Same idea, different quirks: SAT (no published numbers at all) and ACT (real 5 MB / 640×480 spec) — or see the full verified table.