Your LinkedIn photo is mostly seen as a circle, and a small one
LinkedIn masks your profile photo into a circle and shows it large on exactly one screen: your own profile. Everywhere else — the feed, search results, comments, connection requests, the recruiter's inbox — it renders at a few dozen pixels. Whatever survives at that size is your headshot. The shape of your face, how much contrast there is between you and the background, and roughly what you're wearing all survive. Fine detail does not.
So upload big and crop square. LinkedIn asks for at least 400 × 400 pixels and accepts far larger; every PoseLab tier delivers well above that (1024 × 1536, or 1280 × 1920 on Premium), which means you can crop to a square without softening anything. Keep your eyes about a third of the way down the frame — the circular mask eats the corners, and a face centred too low loses its chin to the crop.
Background contrast is what makes a thumbnail readable
The most common problem with a LinkedIn photo isn't quality, it's that the face and the background sit at the same brightness. Dark hair against a dark room, pale skin against a white wall, a busy office behind both. At full size it looks fine. At 48 pixels it turns into a smudge, and a smudge is what most people actually see.
Pick a style whose background does the separating for you. Friendly puts you on a bright off-white backdrop, which is the most legible option if your hair is dark. Corporate's mid-grey wall does the same job for lighter hair. The same logic applies to wardrobe: fine stripes, checks, and small prints break up at thumbnail size, while plain colours hold their shape all the way down.
How often to change it — and what to change with it
Refresh your photo when you stop looking like it, not on a schedule. New glasses, a beard you kept or lost, a significant change in hair length or colour, or a move into work where the old photo reads wrong. Being recognisable when you walk into the interview or the conference is worth more than being current.
When you do swap it, swap it everywhere in the same week: LinkedIn, your email avatar, Slack, your company bio page, any conference or speaker profile. One face repeated across every place someone might check you is far easier to remember than five different ones. That's also the argument for a gallery rather than a single image — you use one photo everywhere that matters, and keep the alternates for the places that ask for something different.
