LinkedIn crops and resizes every image you upload, and if you do not prepare them at the right dimensions beforehand, the result is a stretched banner, a portrait photo with your forehead cut off, or a logo that looks blurry on high-resolution screens. None of this requires Photoshop to fix.
Profile picture
LinkedIn displays profile photos as a circle, cropped from whatever square you provide. The recommended size is 400 x 400 pixels, and the maximum file size is 8 MB.
In practice, most phones shoot photos that are 3000-5000 pixels wide. A raw phone selfie will upload fine technically, but it is a lot of data for a thumbnail that will be displayed at 72 x 72 pixels in search results. Compress it first.
Open Image crop on toolit, set the ratio to 1:1, drag the crop box so your face is centered with some breathing room around it, and download. Then run it through Image compress to bring the file down to 100-200 KB. LinkedIn will display it identically and you are not wasting server space or upload time.
Background banner
The LinkedIn background banner is displayed at 1584 x 396 pixels - a very wide, shallow 4:1 ratio. Most photos are not this shape, which is why uploaded banners so often look like a zoomed-in slice of something that made more sense at a different crop.
Crop your banner image to 4:1 in Image crop before uploading. This gives you full control over what part of the image is visible rather than letting LinkedIn guess. Aim for a file size under 4 MB - LinkedIn's limit is 8 MB but a well-compressed banner at 1584 x 396 should be well under 1 MB.
Company page logo and banner
- Company logo: 300 x 300 pixels, shown as a square with slightly rounded corners
- Company cover image: 1128 x 191 pixels - another very wide, shallow crop
- Life tab main image: 1128 x 376 pixels
The same principle applies: crop to the right ratio first, then compress. A company logo should be a PNG if it has a transparent background. A banner photo can be JPEG or WebP.
Why LinkedIn images look soft on high-resolution screens
LinkedIn re-encodes images when you upload them. This means that even if you upload a sharp 2000-pixel-wide banner, the output might look a little softer than the original. You cannot fully control this, but starting with a sharp, well-compressed source image gives the platform the best material to work with.
Use Image convert on toolit to convert your banner to JPEG at 90% quality before uploading if you want to give LinkedIn the cleanest possible source to re-encode from.