India PAN Card Photo Maker — Free, Fast & Private
Protean, the operator formerly called NSDL, publishes the PAN photograph as a physical object and not as a file. Its TIN-PAN instruction page tells individual applicants to affix a recent colour photograph of 3.5 cm by 2.5 cm, and adds a rule that belongs to no other document here: the signature must not be put across or on the photograph. Pixel dimensions and a DPI figure are not on that page at all. This page therefore exports 213 by 264 pixels at 216 DPI, which is the only entry in the catalogue not built at 300 DPI and by a distance the smallest image in it, roughly a quarter of the pixel area of a 413 by 531 passport photo. Be aware that the printed field and the pixel target describe different shapes: 25 by 35 millimetres is 0.714 wide to tall, 213 by 264 is 0.807, about 13 per cent apart, so a file built to one is not a file built to the other.
India uses a deep frame for its PAN Card: 25×35 mm, which is 10 mm more height than width. NSDL / UTIITSL sets the head at 65–80% of that height and the eyes at 55–70% up from the lower edge, on plain white, saved as JPEG.
Coloured photo on white background. Full face, front view, eyes open. Photo width must equal the field size on the PAN card. No glasses with glare, no caps or headgear (except religious). The 213×264 px upload is proportionally about 13% wider than the 25×35 mm printed field — the pixel size is what the online form checks.
Resizing a 35 by 45 millimetre passport photograph you already own is where this goes wrong, and the damage is subtle enough to survive a glance. Stretch a face by 13 per cent and it reads as a slightly different face to whoever is comparing it against your other documents. Start from the original capture. The second mistake is the pen. Because the form asks you to sign near the photograph, people sign confidently and let the stroke run across a corner of it, and Protean's own instructions rule that out in as many words. Leave the photograph clean. Framing, unusually, is the forgiving part: the head band here runs 65 to 80 per cent, wider than the fixed 70 to 80 that most of the 35 by 45 documents apply, so there is real latitude in how much of the frame your face fills, and none at all in the proportion of the frame itself.
All of that happens in this browser tab: 213×264 JPEG on plain white, nothing uploaded. Figures come from NSDL / UTIITSL — Income Tax Department, Govt of India. If one has gone stale, contact@minipx.com.