India Aadhaar Photo Maker — Free, Fast & Private
What separates this document from the rest of the Indian set is its floor, not its ceiling. Aadhaar records a 4 kilobyte minimum against the passport's 10, for the same 100 kilobyte limit, and 4 kilobytes is the joint lowest figure anywhere in this catalogue, matched only by the PAN card. Spread across the 219,303 pixels of a 413 by 531 image that works out at roughly one byte for every 53 pixels, which is a genuinely small file, so in practice the minimum almost never binds and the whole margin sits at the top of the range. Background is the other place this specification breathes: the requirement recorded for it accepts a light-coloured backdrop with white preferred, rather than demanding white outright, which is a softer reading than the Chinese visa or the Korean passport allow.
The India Aadhaar photo is 35×45 mm on plain white in print, and 413×531 px where the India form wants an upload. UIDAI puts the head at 70–80% of the height, chin to crown, and the eyes at 60–70% up from the bottom edge.
Neutral facial expression. No glasses with glare. Light-coloured background acceptable but white preferred.
Glare, not geometry. Spectacle lenses that throw a highlight across either eye are the failure this document invites, and the highlight that looks faint on a phone screen is unmistakable once the face is enlarged for a biometric check. Nothing in cropping repairs it after the shutter, so the fix is to take the picture again without the glasses. Expression is the second one: neutral means neutral, and the half-smile people default to when a camera is pointed at them reads as a defect on an identity record. Note also what this page does not claim. The authority behind Aadhaar publishes far less about photograph preparation than the passport, visa and OCI authorities on the neighbouring pages do, so this entry leans on the recorded specification rather than on a rulebook we could read for ourselves, and the gap is documented rather than filled in with a neighbouring country's rule. For scale, only one other entry in the whole catalogue shares that 4 kilobyte minimum, the PAN card; every remaining specification sets its floor at 10 kilobytes or higher and eight of them start at 40 or above, which puts Aadhaar and PAN in a class of two at the permissive end and makes over-compression the least likely way to fail here.
All of that happens in this browser tab: 413×531 JPEG on plain white, nothing uploaded. Figures come from UIDAI — Unique Identification Authority of India. If one has gone stale, contact@minipx.com.