Add name and date to a photo

Why the text has to be in the picture

NTA requires the candidate's name and the date the photograph was taken to be printed on the photograph itself for NEET and JEE. SSC and several state boards ask for the same thing. It is not decoration and it is not metadata: admit-card printing and physical document verification work from the photograph alone, so anything not inside the image does not exist as far as the process is concerned.

Most people do this in MS Paint, which is why so many uploads come back with the text cut off, the photo re-saved three times, or the whole thing at the wrong pixel size.

Your name in your own script

This runs in your browser, and that is a deliberate technical decision rather than a privacy slogan. Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Malayalam and Kannada all need real text shaping — vowel signs that render before the consonant they follow, conjunct ligatures, matras that attach above and below. Get that wrong and the result is not slightly ugly, it is a different word. Every browser has a proper text shaper built in and uses your device's own fonts, so your name comes out the way you wrote it. A server-side renderer frequently does not, and would be silently wrong for a large share of the people who need this most.

Three ways to place it

A white strip added below the photograph is the usual choice and the safest: nothing is covered and nothing is lost. A strip above works the same way. The overlay option prints across the bottom of the photograph itself, which keeps the image at its original size — useful when a form has already fixed the pixel dimensions and adding a strip would break them. There is also a switch to take the strip out of the picture rather than adding it on, for the same reason.

Sizing itself

The text is fitted to the width of the strip automatically: it starts at the largest size the band can hold and steps down until it fits with a margin. A long name in a script with wide glyphs comes out smaller than a short one, which is correct — legible and inside the frame beats a fixed size that runs off the edge.

Then get the file size right

Setting a maximum here saves a round trip, since the photo you just added text to is the one the portal is going to weigh. NTA wants the finished file between 10 and 200 KB. If your form specifies a minimum as well, take the result to the exam photo and signature resizer and pick your board's preset, which handles both ends of the window.

Order of operations

Add the text first, then resize to the specification. Doing it the other way round means the text is scaled down along with everything else and can end up unreadable at 413 × 531 — which is a rejection at document verification rather than at upload, and much later in the process.