Sizing your LinkedIn profile picture

When customers come in for a quick, professional headshot for their job/profession, they almost certainly end up using it for their LinkedIn profile picture. It’s almost expected at this point, which is why we assume you’ll need it eventually and shoot you with this in mind.

In a perfect world, LinkedIn would allow any size photo you upload to fit perfectly inside of the profile picture box. That would certainly make the most sense, but like many things on the internet these days, what you want and what is available to you are often two different things. As many frustrated users can attest to, a normal 2:3 ratio portrait photo does not fit into LinkedIn’s mandatory 1:1 square container. So good luck trying to upload a portrait photo, because it won’t work.

There are two options to help you get the correct photo size successfully uploaded:

1. Take your existing portrait picture into a program that can crop photos, and eliminate 33% of the picture’s total height, which will leave you with a perfect square. In the photos below, you’ll immediately notice that you lose a good chuck of your torso, but that’s unavoidable when you are starting with a portrait.

2. The other less-appealing option is to keep your original photo and add 33% width (in the form of white space.) You can do this by increasing the canvas size in a program like Photoshop. That not-so-great result will look like this (line added to show the effect.)

A good rule of thumb to follow is to tell your photographer that your picture is going to be used for LinkedIn purposes. This way they can crop the picture for you in post-production, or they can shoot a few photos in landscape mode and allow for more leeway when eliminating the photos width.