LinkedIn Profile Picture Tips: A Headshot That Works at 48 Pixels

A good LinkedIn profile picture is a recent, well-lit photo where your face fills about 60% of the frame, uploaded as a square of at least 400 × 400 pixels. LinkedIn crops it into a circle, so keep your whole head and a little shoulder inside the centre of the square.

Everything else is detail. But the detail matters, because most people will see your photo not on your profile but as a 40-to-50-pixel circle beside a comment or a post. At that size, a photo of you standing in front of a mountain is a photo of a mountain.

LinkedIn profile picture specs

Full specs and crop guidance live on our profile photo size page.

Design for the thumbnail, not the profile

Your profile page shows the photo reasonably large. Almost nowhere else does. In the feed, in comments, in search results, in message threads and in "people you may know", it is a small circle — and those placements are where most people actually encounter you.

So test your photo small. Shrink it on screen until it is roughly the size of a fingernail. Can you still tell it is a person? Can you tell it is you? If the answer is "a smudge with a shirt", crop tighter. Face size is the single biggest improvement most profile photos can make.

How to take a decent headshot with a phone

1. Step 1

   Face a window

   Soft daylight from in front of you is better than any ring light you own. Avoid direct overhead sun and avoid having the window behind you.

2. Step 2

   Use the rear camera at head height

   The rear camera is sharper than the selfie camera. Prop the phone on a shelf or ask someone to hold it level with your eyes — shooting from below is unflattering for everyone.

3. Step 3

   Step back and zoom slightly

   Standing very close distorts faces. Stand a metre or two away and crop afterwards; you will look more like yourself.

4. Step 4

   Choose a plain background

   A wall, a hedge, an out-of-focus office. Anything that does not compete with your face at thumbnail size.

5. Step 5

   Take thirty, keep one

   Professional photographers do not get it in one shot either. Take a burst, then pick the one where you look like you on a good day.

Profile picture checklist

• Taken in the last two or three years
• Face fills roughly 60% of the square
• Whole head inside the centre circle — nothing important in the corners
• Soft, even light on your face
• Plain or blurred background
• Recognisable when shrunk to thumbnail size
• At least 400 × 400 px, under 8 MB
• Matches how you look on video calls

Common mistakes

Group photos with you cropped out of the middle; wedding photos; photos with sunglasses; logos instead of faces on personal profiles; and photos so old that colleagues ask whether that is your son. Each of these makes you harder to recognise, which is the one job the photo has.

The other quiet mistake is a photo that clashes with your banner. The two sit next to each other at the top of your profile, and the circle overlaps the bottom-left of the banner on most layouts. Check that nothing important on the banner sits behind your photo — our image size checker will show you the overlap.

Do you need a professional photographer?

Not usually. A professional headshot is worth it if you are in a client-facing role where your face is part of the pitch, or if your employer is paying. For most people, a phone, a window and a patient friend get you 90% of the way there.

What you do need is to update it. A photo that no longer looks like you is worse than an average one that does, because it creates a small moment of mismatch every time someone meets you. Set a reminder to retake it every couple of years, or whenever you change something obvious — hair, glasses, beard, the general passage of time.