OCI photo, signature and document upload size

The OCI Services portal asks for three kinds of file: a square photo, a wide 1:3 signature and PDF documents. Here are the limits from Indian government pages and how to meet each one.

By Deftfile · Last checked: October 30, 2026 · Drafted with AI and checked against the official pages linked below.

Rules change — check the official page before you apply. Indian missions sometimes word the rules differently. Apply only on ociservices.gov.in; Deftfile is not an agent and does not submit applications.

The exact rules

Photo

File type: JPEG / JPG.
File size: 200 KB at most. No minimum is given.
Shape: Square: height must equal width.
Pixels: At least 200 × 200, at most 900 × 900.
Background: Plain light colour, not white, with no border.
Pose: Front view of head and shoulders, full face in the middle, face covering about 80% of the photo.

Source: OCI Services FAQ, question 9, repeated by the Embassy of India in Berlin.

Signature

File type: JPEG / JPG.
File size: 200 KB at most.
Shape: Aspect ratio 1:3 (height to width), so the image is three times as wide as it is tall.
Pixels: At least 200 wide × 67 high, at most 900 wide × 300 high.
Minors: A child who cannot sign gives a left-hand thumb impression in black or blue ink instead.

Source: the Embassy of India in Buenos Aires for the ratio and pixels; the OCI FAQ above for the 200 KB limit.

Documents

File type: PDF.
File size: 500 KB at most per file.
Content: Scanned copies of documents you have self-attested (signed), each uploaded under its heading. The upload section has 4 categories.
Indian passport: When it is your proof of Indian origin, upload the first page, the last page and the observation page if there is one.

Source: the Embassy of India in Buenos Aires.

You may see a higher PDF limit quoted on applicant forums. We could not find it on an official page, so this guide uses 500 KB. A file under 500 KB also fits any higher limit.

The white-background trap

U.S. visa photos need a white or off-white background and the India e-Visa asks for white or a light colour, but the OCI photo must be a light colour that is not white. A photo made for another application can be the right size and still be wrong for OCI.

Common reasons uploads fail

On applicant forums such as immihelp, people report the portal saying there is “some problem with the format” without saying which rule failed. In one 2017 thread, a user whose file already met the size rules suggested re-saving the JPEG with simpler encoding settings in an image editor. Beyond that, our reading of the rules suggests these causes:

Photo too large in pixels. A photo straight from a phone camera is usually thousands of pixels wide, well over the 900 × 900 maximum even after cropping to a square.
Over 200 KB. A 900 × 900 JPEG at high quality can pass 200 KB.
Signature not 1:3. A signature cropped loosely, or a whole sheet of paper, is too tall. 600 × 200 or 900 × 300 is exactly 1:3; 600 × 250 is not.
Signature too small. A tight crop of a small signature can fall under 200 × 67.
PDF over 500 KB. A few pages scanned at high resolution in colour can reach several megabytes.

From phone to OCI files, step by step

Photo. Stand against a pale wall that is not white, such as light grey, facing a window, and have someone take the photo at eye level. Then open the visa photo and signature resizer, pick “India OCI — photo”, and zoom until your face fills most of the square. It saves a 600 × 600 JPEG under 200 KB. It does not change or check the background colour.
Signature. Sign in black or dark blue ink on plain white paper. Photograph it from straight above in even light. In the same resizer pick “India OCI — signature”; it whitens the paper and fits the signature into a 600 × 200 frame, which is exactly 1:3. For other signature sizes, the signature cleaner gives more control.
Documents. Sign each copy first (self-attest), then scan or photograph it. To combine pages into one PDF under 500 KB, use images to PDF under a KB limit for photos or merge PDFs under a KB limit for existing PDFs. If you already have one PDF that is too big, compress the PDF to 500 KB.
Or do all of it in one place. The document kit makes the OCI photo, signature and PDFs together.

Questions

My child cannot sign. What goes in the signature box?

A left-hand thumb impression. Both the Buenos Aires and Berlin embassy pages say so. Press the thumb on white paper and treat the image like a signature: the same 1:3 shape and pixel limits apply.

Is 200 KB counted as 200,000 or 204,800 bytes?

The pages do not say. A file of 200,000 bytes or less passes either way, and that is what our tools aim for.

Are my documents uploaded to Deftfile?

No. Our tools run inside your browser, so passports and certificates stay on your device.

Limits of this guide

The OCI rules on this page come from the OCI Services FAQ and Indian embassy pages read on October 30, 2026. Missions can add their own document lists and fees, and this guide does not cover which documents your category needs. The OCI portal and your Indian mission have the final word.