Crop before you scale when the form wants a portrait box
Wrong aspect first, then resize, wastes pixels. Crop to the box the portal asks for, then scale into the max width and height.
12 November 2026
Answer: In Resize, crop to the required aspect (often 3:4), set max width/height and KB, then download. Check the result in Photo check.
Tool: Resize image — free, nothing uploaded.
Scaling a full landscape phone shot into a tall portrait box letterboxes or squashes the face. Cropping first keeps the head in frame and uses the pixel budget on what the clerk sees.
Do kilobyte compression last. A huge canvas compressed hard looks worse than a correctly cropped smaller canvas at moderate quality.
Photo check confirms the final width, height, format, and size against the rules you typed. A pass here is arithmetic — not an approval from the portal.