Compress signature for SSC 2026

SSC’s official signature spec

The Staff Selection Commission prints one signature rule across its current notices — CGL, CHSL, GD, MTS. The table above quotes it from the SSC CGL 2026 — Notice, with the page it sits on.

Why there is no SSC photo file to shrink

Most guides for SSC still tell you to resize a passport photo. That advice is out of date. The notice says: candidates are required to capture their live photo through webcam/mobile device and upload. The portal opens your webcam, or your phone camera, partway through the form, and the picture is taken there and then. Nothing you compress beforehand is used for it.

What you can prepare for the live capture is the setting, not a file. The notice lists it plainly:

• Good light, plain background.
• No cap, mask or glasses.

So the only upload you can get wrong in advance is the signature, and its window is tight: the top of the band is 2 times the bottom. Overshoot or undershoot and you are outside the figure the notice prints.

6.0 × 2.0 cm in one notice, a different box in another

The note under the table shows a disagreement inside one notice. The graduate-level notice gives 6.0 × 2.0 cm in its main text and a narrower box in its annexure; both sentences are printed there word for word, with their pages.

Both say “about”, neither is stated in pixels, and the kilobyte range is identical in each. For the other notices there is nothing to resolve: sign to the 6.0 × 2.0 cm shape they use throughout. For the graduate-level notice SSC has not said which of its two sentences wins, so keep the source scan and crop it again if a correction notice settles it. The size band is the part that does not change, and it is the part the tool here enforces.

Landing a scan inside a ten-kilobyte window

A phone photo of a signature is millions of pixels of paper with a little ink in the middle. Saved as a JPEG it is easily a hundred times too heavy. Three moves fix it, in this order:

1. Crop to the ink. Leave a thin margin and throw the rest of the sheet away. Blank paper is not free to encode; its grain and shadows cost bytes. If you need to trim first, crop the scan here, then come back.
2. Scale it down. A signature strip a few hundred pixels wide is still perfectly legible on a hall ticket.
3. Compress to the band, then check the floor. The minimum binds just as hard as the maximum. A strip squeezed with maximum compression can drop below the lower figure, and then it has to come back up.

Kilobytes are ambiguous, so the tool reads each limit the safe way. It keeps the file at or under 20,000 bytes, treating a kilobyte as 1,000 bytes, and at or over 10,240 bytes, treating it as 1,024. A file that clears both readings passes whichever one the portal uses.

A dark pen on plain white paper gives the cleanest scan and the smallest file at the same legibility. That is practical advice, not an SSC rule; the notice itself only fixes the format, the size and the rough dimensions.

If you are filling other forms this season

Do not reuse this file for railway posts. The RRB signature sits in a heavier band, 30–49 KB, so an SSC-sized file is refused there for being too small. The government exams hub lists every exam MiniPx has checked against its own notice, with the one detail that sets each apart.

The compression runs inside your browser. The signature is not uploaded to MiniPx at any point, and the exact output size is shown before you download.