Drop your PAN application photo or signature, get a JPEG at the exact pixels and under the KB cap your portal enforces — preset here to the NSDL photo format (197×276 px, ≤20 KB, safe in every mode). Nothing is uploaded; it all runs in your browser.
India's PAN card has two application portals, and they want different files. Protean (formerly NSDL e-Gov) specifies the photograph as a colour JPEG, 3.5×2.5 cm at 200 DPI — that works out to about 197×276 pixels — and the signature as 2×4.5 cm at 200 DPI, about 354×157 pixels. The size cap depends on how you apply: the DSC-based instruction table caps the photo at 20 KB and the signature at 10 KB, while Protean's guidance for the e-Sign scanned-image route allows up to 50 KB each. Supporting documents are separate: PDF/A or JPEG at up to 300 KB per page. This page is preset to the photo format at ≤20 KB — a file that passes in every mode. For the signature, type 354x157 into Exact size and 10 KB into Target.
Many guides state the NSDL photo spec as a 20–50 KB range, as if 20 KB were a minimum. The official instruction tables state only maximums — 20 KB (DSC mode) or 50 KB (e-Sign mode) — and no floor. The “range” is those two modes' caps blurred together. A sharp 15 KB photo is fine; there's nothing to pad here.
The UTIITSL portal is commonly documented as wanting the photo at 213×213 pixels under 30 KB and the signature at 400×200 pixels under 60 KB, both JPEG. UTIITSL doesn't publish a tidy spec table the way Protean does, so treat what the upload screen tells you as the authority — set Exact size and Target above to whatever it says. Both portals reject non-JPEG uploads (iPhone HEIC included — drop the HEIC straight into PixFit and the JPEG output it produces is what you upload).
PixFit gets the pixels exact (center-cropping if your source is a different shape), finds the best JPEG quality under the cap, and strips EXIF/GPS by re-encoding. The DPI label field is preset to 200, so the JPEG header carries the 200-DPI figure Protean's tables name — worth knowing: the cm-at-200-DPI arithmetic is what produces the pixel counts above, and pixels plus file size are what upload validation primarily checks; the header label now matches too. It can't check composition rules — recent photo, plain light background, face clearly visible, signature in black ink on white paper without capitals. The current instructions on tin.tin.proteantech.in or pan.utiitsl.com win if they disagree with anything here.