LinkedIn Image Size Guide

LinkedIn image dimensions at a glance

LinkedIn has six distinct image slots, each with its own required dimensions and cropping behaviour. Getting them wrong is not just an aesthetic issue: a banner that looks fine on desktop can cut off your company name entirely on mobile, and a profile picture uploaded at the wrong ratio gets auto-cropped in a way that leaves half your face outside the circle. The table below is current as of 2026; LinkedIn has not changed these specs since 2022 but the rendering behaviour on mobile continues to shift slightly between app versions.

The most commonly confused pair is the personal profile banner (1584 × 396 px) and the company page banner (1128 × 191 px). They look similar in the interface, but using a personal banner image on a company page produces a noticeably undersized, stretched result because the ratios are different — 4:1 versus roughly 5.9:1. Keep separate exports for each.

Why uploaded images get cropped or go blurry

Three things cause most upload failures, and they stack. The first is ratio mismatch: if you upload a standard 16:9 photograph (1920 × 1080 px) as a profile banner, LinkedIn stretches it to fill the 4:1 banner frame. The top and bottom thirds of the image disappear, and the remaining strip is stretched horizontally to fill width. The result looks nothing like what you exported.

The second cause is file size and resolution mismatch. LinkedIn resamples uploads to fit its serving infrastructure. Upload a 6000 × 4000 px DSLR shot as a 400 × 400 px profile picture, and LinkedIn's downsampling algorithm introduces softness that you would not get from exporting at exactly 400 × 400 px yourself. The platform's downsampler is not running Lanczos resampling — it is a fast bicubic pass that blurs fine details like eyelashes and hair edges. Export at the target dimensions in your photo editor and let LinkedIn serve what you provide.

The third cause is LinkedIn's JPEG re-encoding on ingest. Every image goes through at least one JPEG compression pass when you upload, regardless of whether you upload a JPEG or PNG. If your source file was already a heavily compressed JPEG (anything saved at under 70 % quality), this second pass compounds the block artefacts. Flat gradient regions — backgrounds, skin tone fills, company logo backgrounds — suffer the most visible damage. Export at 85 % JPEG quality or higher and you give LinkedIn's encoder a clean starting point rather than pre-degraded input.

The circular crop on profile pictures: what actually gets cut

LinkedIn renders profile pictures as circles everywhere — feed posts, comment threads, search results, the profile page itself. The circular mask inscribes the square image exactly, which means all four corners are hidden. On a 400 × 400 px image, the circle cuts off a triangular region from each corner. The furthest visible point from the centre is the midpoint of each edge; the invisible regions start at approximately 59 px from each corner along each edge.

In practical terms: a headshot where your shoulders extend to the bottom corners of the frame will show your shoulders cleanly after cropping. A group photo where a second person stands in the top-left corner will lose most of that person to the circular mask. LinkedIn's own positioning tool lets you drag the crop centre, but you cannot change the circular mask shape. The safe approach is to compose for the circle from the start: subject centred, a buffer of at least 40 px on each side between the subject's outermost features and the image edge.

One specific failure pattern comes up constantly with product logos: a square icon with the logo touching the edges of the canvas. LinkedIn's circular mask clips the corners of the icon shape. The standard fix is to add transparent padding around the logo so it sits inside an inscribed circle, then export with a white or brand-colour background fill before uploading, because LinkedIn fills transparent PNG pixels with white. A logo that looks centred and padded on your design canvas arrives on LinkedIn showing as a full white square, with the circular mask cutting nothing meaningful.

Banner safe zones and the mobile crop problem

The personal background banner displays at 1584 × 396 px on desktop, but on the LinkedIn mobile app the banner is displayed at a narrower viewport. The app crops roughly 240–300 px from each side, depending on screen width. On a standard iPhone 15 in portrait orientation, you lose approximately 280 px from each side, leaving an effective display width of about 1024 px centred on the banner.

Any text placed within 300 px of the left or right edge of the banner is at risk of being hidden on mobile. This is not a rare edge case — more than 60 % of LinkedIn usage is on mobile, according to the platform's own published data from 2023. A banner with “Available for consulting — contact@email.com” running along the left edge looks fine when you preview it from your desktop but is invisible to the majority of people viewing your profile from their phone.

The safe approach is to keep all meaningful content within the central 984 px of the banner width (leaving 300 px clearance on each side), and to place nothing critical within the bottom 50 px of height, where the profile picture circle overlaps the banner on mobile. Design tools like Canva and Figma have LinkedIn banner templates with these safe zones marked; if you are working in Photoshop, add a guide at x = 300 and x = 1284 before you start laying out content.

Image metadata, LinkedIn's compression, and why cleaning helps

LinkedIn strips most EXIF metadata from uploaded images, but not always completely. GPS coordinates and DateTimeOriginal are typically removed, but XMP fields and certain IPTC copyright tags have been observed surviving LinkedIn's ingest pass in various tested cases through 2024. If you are uploading photos that contain location data — conference shots, event photography, photos taken at your home office — you cannot rely on LinkedIn to remove that data for you.

The metadata question intersects with image quality in one specific way. LinkedIn's JPEG encoder runs at a fixed quality setting on ingest. Images that already have heavy compression artefacts, strong AI-generation signatures, or overly smooth gradient regions tend to produce more visible block artefacts after LinkedIn's second compression pass. Running a photo through the metadata removal tool before uploading removes EXIF blocks and produces a clean JPEG that gives LinkedIn's encoder a better starting point. The resulting upload tends to show fewer block artefacts in the sky and skin tone regions that suffer most from repeated JPEG compression.

This matters most for profile pictures and banner images that represent you or your company professionally. A feed post that looks slightly soft attracts less scrutiny than a profile picture that looks noticeably compressed. If you are using a photo from a professional shoot, ask your photographer for the full-resolution original, resize it yourself to 400 × 400 px at 90 % JPEG quality, then upload that — rather than uploading the full-resolution original and letting LinkedIn produce a suboptimal downsample.

Step-by-step export process: desktop and phone

The cleanest workflow for a profile picture on desktop: open the source photo in any image editor, crop to a 1:1 square keeping the subject centred, resize the canvas to exactly 400 × 400 px, export as JPEG at 85–90 % quality. On Windows, use Paint 3D or IrfanView if you do not have Photoshop; on macOS, the Preview app can crop and resize without any third-party software. The specific tool matters less than the final export dimensions.

On a phone, the process is slightly different because most gallery apps do not expose precise resize controls. Open the photo in your phone's default editor, use the crop tool set to a 1:1 ratio, drag the crop box to frame your subject, and save. The saved file will be larger than 400 × 400 px — that is fine; LinkedIn will downsample it. What the phone workflow cannot easily do is enforce the exact 400 px dimension. If blurriness in the resulting profile picture bothers you, use the desktop process for profile pictures specifically.

For banners on mobile, the Canva app has a LinkedIn banner template built in. Create a design at the correct 1584 × 396 px canvas, place your content within the safe zone guides, and export to your camera roll. The Canva export produces a PNG; convert it to JPEG in your gallery app before uploading if file size is a concern, though at banner dimensions the PNG is unlikely to exceed 2 MB.

Optional but worthwhile: after exporting and before uploading, run the image through the image dimensions checker to confirm the pixel dimensions match your target. Then check the metadata removal tool to strip EXIF before uploading. Both tools run locally in your browser without sending your file anywhere.

Common mistakes that ruin LinkedIn images

Transparent PNG backgrounds are the most common mistake for company logos. LinkedIn renders transparency as white. A white logo on a transparent background becomes invisible. A dark logo on transparent becomes a dark logo on white, which may clash with your brand palette. Always supply a flat, opaque background. If your logo was designed for dark mode, create a separate version with the background colour filled in before uploading.

CMYK colour mode is the second most common problem, particularly for images exported from print workflows. LinkedIn's browser and app rendering is RGB-only. A CMYK JPEG looks fine in Adobe Acrobat and in print, but browsers convert CMYK to RGB using a generic ICC profile that typically shifts colours toward a washed-out, slightly greenish cast. The fix is to convert to sRGB in Photoshop or any colour-aware export tool before saving the file you will upload. Check the image mode in Photoshop under Image > Mode; if it reads CMYK, switch to RGB Color before exporting.

File names with spaces occasionally cause issues on some LinkedIn clients and third-party scheduling tools. A file named “Profile Photo April 2026.jpg” may break certain automated publishing workflows that construct URLs from filenames without encoding spaces. Use hyphens or underscores: “profile-photo-2026.jpg” is unambiguous across every tool in the pipeline.

Finally: uploading at 1x resolution instead of 2x for high-density screens. Profile pictures are displayed at 200 × 200 px on standard screens but at 400 × 400 physical pixels on Retina and equivalent high-DPI displays. If you upload at exactly 200 × 200 px, your photo will look sharp on a standard monitor and noticeably soft on any Retina device — which covers virtually all MacBook users and a significant share of iPhone and Android users viewing LinkedIn. Uploading at 400 × 400 px covers both cases.