LinkedIn accepts a wide range of image sizes and then crops, scales and compresses them, which is how a sharp photo ends up soft in a circle. The specs below are the ones worth uploading at.
The sizes
| Image | Upload at | Shape | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profile photo | 800 x 800 px | Square, cropped to a circle | Minimum 400 x 400. Max file size 8 MB. |
| Background banner | 1584 x 396 px | 4:1 landscape | Heavily cropped on mobile — keep the centre clear. |
| Company logo | 300 x 300 px | Square | Shown small; avoid fine detail or thin type. |
| Company cover | 1128 x 191 px | Wide landscape | Different ratio to a personal banner. |
| Shared link preview | 1200 x 627 px | 1.91:1 | Same as a standard OG image. |
| Post image | 1200 x 1200 px | Square works best in feed | Portrait 1080 x 1350 also renders well. |
Formats: PNG or JPG. PNG for anything with text or a logo, JPG for photographs. LinkedIn recompresses either way, so upload at the size above rather than larger — a 4000 px photo gets downscaled by their pipeline, which is softer than downscaling it yourself first.
Cropping for a circle
Your profile photo is uploaded as a square and displayed as a circle, so the corners are thrown away. That trips up more photos than the resolution ever does.
- Centre your face, slightly above the middle. Eyes at roughly 40% from the top of the square.
- Leave clearance at the bottom. The circle cuts the corners hardest, and a chin sitting near the square's edge gets clipped.
- Fill about 60% of the frame with your head and shoulders. Wider than that and you're unrecognisable in the 48 px version next to your comments.
- Check it small. The most common display size is tiny. If it doesn't read at thumbnail size, the crop is too wide.
Resize without softening it
If your photo is much larger than 800 px, downscale it yourself before uploading. Our free crop and resize tool does exact dimensions in the browser, and the photo enhancer helps if the original is already soft.
The banner nobody plans for
At 1584 x 396 the background banner is the most-mis-sized image on the platform. Two things to know: your profile photo overlaps the bottom-left corner, and mobile crops the sides in significantly. Anything important — text, a logo, a face — needs to sit in the middle 60% and away from the bottom-left.
Specs aren't the hard part
A correctly-sized bad photo is still a bad photo. The things that decide whether a LinkedIn photo works are the crop, the light and the expression, all covered in the LinkedIn photo guide, with posing in headshot poses.
If you don't have a usable frame at all, AI headshots output at square dimensions ready to upload, generated from a few selfies.
