Drop your photo, get a JPEG comfortably under the 500 KB cap the Lok Sewa online application portal enforces on the photograph, signature and citizenship uploads — at the best quality that fits. Everything runs in your browser; nothing leaves your device.
Applications for Nepal’s federal government posts are filed on the Public Service Commission’s own portal, psconline1.psc.gov.np (Lok Sewa Aayog). The Documents step of the profile publishes one file rule and applies it to every image slot: JPG or PNG, no more than 500 KB. That covers the scanned photograph (“a recent photo of the candidate”), the scanned signature, and the citizenship certificate — front and back are separate uploads, each under the same cap. The portal’s own rejection messages state it verbatim: “Photograph file size should not be more than 500KB”, “Photograph file should be in Jpg or Png format”. This page has PixFit preset to a 480 KB target — 491,520 bytes, safely under the cap however it’s counted — with JPEG output the portal accepts. Drop the photo, download, upload.
One detail worth knowing from the portal’s own upload check: it compares your file’s byte count against 500,000 — the decimal reading of “500 KB”. A file that a resizer tool calls “500 KB” counting in binary units can weigh up to 512,000 bytes and still bounce with the size error. The 480 KB preset lands under both readings, so this distinction never becomes your problem. There is no minimum size, so nothing ever needs padding — and at 480 KB of budget, almost any phone photo fits at maximum JPEG quality with no visible compression at all.
The portal checks the format and the bytes. It does not check pixel dimensions — no width, no height, no aspect ratio appears anywhere in its upload rules. Yet search for “PSC photo resize” and the top tools confidently prescribe “150×200 pixels, under 30 KB, JPG” — those are Kerala PSC numbers, an Indian state commission with its own portal, nothing to do with Nepal’s Lok Sewa Aayog. The popular Nepali form walkthroughs, meanwhile, say only “upload the photograph and signature in the correct format” and never state what the format is. For a photo that looks right on your admit card, a normal passport-style head-and-shoulders crop works — roughly 3:4, say 600×800 pixels — but that’s composition advice, not a portal rule. If the upload screen in front of you states numbers this page doesn’t, the portal wins — over resizer sites, and over this page too.
The signature upload takes the same JPG/PNG, 500 KB rule. Sign on white paper, photograph or scan it, and crop tight to the ink so the portal’s preview doesn’t show a stripe of mostly paper — the signature cleanup tool finds the ink, trims to it and puts it on genuinely white background automatically. The citizenship certificate slots want the document readable above all: a straight-on phone photo in even light passes easily under 500 KB here at full quality — check the preview and make sure the certificate text stays crisp. An iPhone HEIC drops straight in; the output is a portal-ready JPEG either way.
Transcripts, equivalence certificates, character certificates and experience records upload as documents, and the portal’s stated rule for them is PDF, JPEG or PNG, maximum 500 KB per file. A photographed certificate becomes a one-page PDF under the cap with PixFit’s PDF output mode — the image-to-PDF under 500 KB page presets that flow, and a multi-page mark sheet can combine into a single PDF that fits the cap as a whole. Already have a PDF that’s over? The compress-a-PDF-to-500 KB page shrinks it in-browser.
PSC advertises posts continuously through the year, and the portal reuses your profile — photo, signature, citizenship, documents — across every advertisement you apply to, so files done right once are done for the season. Two honest caveats. First, Nepal’s provincial commissions (Bagamati, Koshi, Gandaki, Karnali and the rest) run their own separate portals — this page describes the federal portal’s rules, so read the province portal’s own upload screen before assuming they match. Second, individual vacancy notices can impose their own document requirements — the advertisement is the authority for what to upload; this page covers how to make it fit.
An application photo travels with your citizenship number, date of birth and family details, so it shouldn’t detour 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. Apply only at psconline1.psc.gov.np — your login credentials arrive by SMS and email at registration, and the same account later serves your e-admit card. Applying to Bangladesh’s Teletalk portals too? Their spec is pixel-exact and different — see the Bangladesh government job photo page, or the full verified table.
Spec source: the PSC application portal’s own upload step at psconline1.psc.gov.np — the file rules its application code enforces and the exact error messages it shows (English and Nepali interfaces), as read July 2026. These rules change — if the upload screen disagrees with this page, believe the portal.