Drop your photo, get a colour JPEG around 100 KB — small enough to pass every K-ETA rule, current or legacy. The compression runs in your browser; the photo never leaves your device.
South Korea's official K-ETA portal (k-eta.go.kr, Korea Immigration Service) publishes the photo rules in its FAQ: the facial image must be a colour JPG under 20 MB, showing a full face, front view — about 75% of the image — with eyes open and no hats, scarves or sunglasses (religious clothing is allowed if the face is clearly visible from forehead to chin). It does not have to be the same photo as the one in your passport. This page is preset to produce a small colour JPEG from whatever you drop in; the crop, if you set one, and the compression all run in your browser.
Most guides and photo-tool sites say the K-ETA photo must be 700×700 pixels or less and under 100 KB. Those numbers came from the original 2021 upload widget; the portal has since been revamped, and the current official FAQ says only JPG, under 20 MB — the K-ETA mobile app even resizes photos for you automatically. Rather than bet on which rule the screen in front of you enforces, the preset here is 100 KB: a photo at that size passes every published reading, old or new, with no visible quality loss at passport-photo dimensions. If the upload widget still complains about pixel size, type 700x700 into the Exact size field above and re-download. And as always: if the portal in front of you says something different, the portal wins.
Check before you spend the fee — the answer for many travellers this year is no. The Ministry of Justice has extended the temporary K-ETA exemption through December 31, 2026 for the countries and regions already covered by it (the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and most Western European countries among them — the portal shows a pop-up when an exempt passport is scanned). Separately, travellers who are 17 or younger or 65 or older on the date of entry are exempt outright, as are valid visa and residence-card holders, transit passengers, crew, ABTC card holders and diplomatic passport holders. Exempt travellers may still apply voluntarily — an approved K-ETA skips the paper arrival card — but the 10,000 KRW fee is non-refundable even if the application is denied, which is also a good reason to get the photo right the first time. The authoritative list lives on k-eta.go.kr.
A PC application uploads two images: the portrait and a photo of your passport's bio page, and the same official rule applies to both — JPG, under 20 MB. The portal scans the bio-page image to read your details (that scan is also how exemption pop-ups are triggered), so photograph the full page flat, in even light, with no glare across the machine-readable zone at the bottom. If your camera saved it as a huge file, the same tool above brings it under any limit — but don't crop the page edges away to save bytes.
Two cautions. First: the only official application site is k-eta.go.kr (plus the official K-ETA mobile apps) — the space around it is full of agency sites styled to look official that charge several times the 10,000 KRW fee for the same form. Type the address rather than clicking an ad. Second: a travel-authorization photo travels 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. An iPhone HEIC can be dropped straight in. For other countries' formats, see the New Zealand NZeTA, Vietnam e-Visa and India e-Visa pages.