Government form photo and signature maker

The gap between a phone and a form

A government portal refuses anything over 30 kilobytes. A phone produces photographs of four megabytes. That is a factor of over a hundred, and the usual way across it is to compress, look at the number, compress again, and eventually overshoot so far that the result is a mosaic.

This does it the other way round: it searches for the highest quality that fits under the limit, rather than the lowest that works. That takes about eight attempts, happens in under a second, and the difference matters. A photo dropped to the floor when three quarters would have fitted is a photo somebody is asked to submit again.

Only when even the lowest quality worth using is still too large does it start reducing the pixel size, and it tells you when it has. At the same number of bytes, a smaller sharp photograph beats a full-size blocky one every time.

Three portals, and why not thirty

Each of the presets here was read from the portal’s own page or its own PDF, and carries the address and the date it was read. That is the reason there are three.

There is no shortage of sites publishing requirements for dozens of Pakistani portals. They disagree with each other. For one provincial commission the figures on offer are 25 KB, 10 to 40 KB, and 140 by 177 pixels, from three pages that each present theirs as fact and none of which cite anything at all. NADRA’s own photo guidelines PDF, which several of them link to, now redirects to the homepage.

Repeating any of that would be passing on a rumour with a date stamp on it. The custom option does the same job without the invention: your portal states its numbers on the upload page, and typing them in takes ten seconds.

Even for the three that are here, the preset fills the fields and the fields stay editable. These requirements change without announcement, and the portal in front of you is the authority rather than this page.

Millimetres are not pixels

Something worth knowing before you fight with a form: all three of these portals specify a size in millimetres, 35 by 45, and a file size in kilobytes. None of them states a pixel count.

Millimetres are a printing measurement and a file does not have one, so converting needs a resolution. 35 by 45 mm at 300 dots per inch is 413 by 531 pixels, which is the figure most commonly quoted for these forms and is arithmetic rather than something any of them published. That is why it appears in an editable field here instead of being presented as the requirement.

One of the three contradicts itself outright. The passport portal’s text says a photograph may be up to 5 MB, while the photo checker on the same page accepts a maximum of 350 KB. The smaller figure is used, because it is the one actually enforced and a file under it satisfies both readings. The page says so rather than quietly picking one.

Cleaning up a signature

What people have is a signature on a sheet of paper, photographed on a phone: grey, unevenly lit, with a lot of page around the writing. What the form wants is dark ink on white, cropped, under some number of kilobytes.

The work is choosing the brightness below which a pixel counts as ink. Too high and the shadow across the page comes along with the writing; too low and half the signature disappears. A fixed value cannot work, because the right one depends entirely on the light in the room, so it is calculated from the picture’s own histogram by finding the split that leaves the two groups as tightly clustered as possible.

It stays a slider, because a photograph with a strong shadow has three groups rather than two and no automatic choice is going to be right. The percentage beside it is how much of the picture is currently counted as ink, and much above a third means a shadow rather than a signature.

One detail that is easy to get wrong: the strokes are not reduced to pure black and pure white. The pixels along the edge of every stroke are partly ink and partly paper, and rounding each one to a side throws that away and leaves the writing jagged. A short ramp is kept either side of the threshold, while the paper still clears to true white, which is the part the form is checking.

None of it leaves your browser

A photograph of your face and an image of your signature are about the two most personal files you own. They are also exactly what a free tool would be tempted to collect.

Everything here runs in this tab, using your browser’s own image handling. There is no request in this page that could send a file anywhere, nothing is stored, and it keeps working with the network turned off, which is the only demonstration of that claim worth anything.

What this cannot do is judge the photograph. It gets the shape, the size and the file size right, which is what most rejections are about, but whether the background is plain enough, the expression neutral, or the head the right proportion of the frame are decisions a person or a checking system makes. Those rules are listed beside each portal here, and they are worth reading before you take the photograph rather than after it comes back.