LinkedIn profile photo size and specs

These are LinkedIn's own numbers, from its help pages rather than from a blog rounding them off. The profile photo has to be at least 400 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall, can be as large as 7680 × 4320, must come in under 8MB, and has to be a PNG or a JPG. Animated GIFs are not supported.

The background photo behind your name is a completely separate image with its own recommendation: 1584 × 396 pixels, also under 8MB, also JPG or PNG. People routinely upload a square photo there and wonder why almost all of it disappeared — it didn't disappear, it was cropped to a strip about four times wider than it is tall.

A 400 × 400 file is the smallest LinkedIn will take, which is a different thing from the size that looks good. Screens are dense, LinkedIn shows your photo large on your own profile, and anything you upload at exactly the minimum has no headroom left: crop it, or view it on a high-resolution laptop, and it softens.

Uploading big costs you nothing. LinkedIn resizes for display anyway, so the practical rule is to hand it a square file of at least 1000 × 1000 and let it do the work. Every PoseLab headshot arrives comfortably past that mark — 1024 × 1536 on the lower tiers and 1280 × 1920 on Premium — so a square crop still leaves you several times above the floor.

The file is square. The display is a circle, and a circular mask over a square image throws away the four corners — roughly a fifth of what you uploaded. Anything you positioned carefully near an edge is gone, and if your head sits too low in the frame, the bottom of the circle takes your chin with it.

Frame for the circle rather than the file: shoulders up, head centred left to right, and your eyeline sitting around the upper third. Leave a little space above your head so the mask doesn't skim your hairline. If you are cropping an existing photo, do the crop yourself in the phone's photo editor rather than dragging LinkedIn's crop box around — it's easier to judge on a square you control.

There's a second constraint hiding behind the first. Your own profile is the only screen where that circle is big. In the feed, in search results, on comments, in a recruiter's list, it's shown at a few dozen pixels. Three things make it through at that scale: the outline of your head, how strongly you stand out from whatever is behind you, and the broad shape of your clothing. Nothing finer than that does, which is why what makes a thumbnail readable matters more than the last few hundred pixels of resolution.

At 1584 × 396 the background photo is a letterbox, and on desktop your profile photo sits over its lower left. Any subject you centre in the source image ends up either behind your own face or cropped out on mobile, where the strip narrows further.

The practical approach is to keep the middle and left of the banner deliberately empty — a texture, a gradient, a plain colour — and put anything you want read, such as a line of text or a logo, on the right. And check it on a phone before you decide it works. The banner crops differently across devices, and the desktop preview is the version fewest people see.

Four things account for nearly every failed upload, and all of them are in the specs above. The file is a HEIC — the format iPhones save by default, which LinkedIn doesn't accept — so export or share it as a JPEG first. The file is over 8MB, which a modern phone photo genuinely can be. The image is under 400 pixels on one side, which usually means it was already a small crop of something larger. Or it's a GIF.

The one that catches people out is the small crop, because the source is almost always a group photo. Your face in a group shot is often only a few hundred pixels wide, so once it's cropped out it fails the minimum outright — and even when it squeaks past, it was never sharp enough to begin with. That's the most common bad profile photo there is, and it's covered in the mistakes post.

Every number on this page is a floor. Clearing them gets you a photo LinkedIn will accept, not a photo that works — a correctly sized image of you lit from a ceiling fixture against a dark room is still a smudge in the feed. The things that decide that are the ones no spec sheet lists: light on your face, contrast against the background, eye-level framing, and a plain top.

If your current photo clears the specs and still looks wrong, the fix isn't a bigger file. It's a different photo — either taken properly with a phone, which is free and mostly a matter of standing near a window, or created from selfies you already have, which is what we sell. Both beat resizing the one you've got.