LinkedIn banner size: how to make a background photo that fits

The background photo, or banner, is the widest image on a LinkedIn profile and the first thing a recruiter sees. It is also awkward: a very wide, very short strip, partly covered by your profile photo, and cropped differently on phones. Most banners that look wrong were simply made at the wrong shape.

The size to use

LinkedIn recommends 1584 × 396 pixels for a personal profile background. That is a ratio of exactly 4:1: four times as wide as it is tall. Company pages use a different cover image, shown at 1128 × 191 pixels. Use the right one for the page you are editing.

If you upload a normal photo, such as a 3:2 landscape, LinkedIn will make you crop it to the strip, and you lose most of the picture. Choose an image that is already wide, or crop it yourself first so you decide what stays.

Make one step by step

1. Open Crop Image, choose Free, and type a crop width four times its height, for example 2400 × 600 on a large photo.
2. Drag the crop area over the part of the photo you want to keep, and crop.
3. Resize the result to 1584 pixels wide in Resize Image, with the aspect ratio locked. The height comes out at 396.
4. Run it through Compress Image at a high quality setting. A JPG of a few hundred kilobytes is plenty.
5. Upload it on your profile and check it on both a computer and a phone.

What gets covered

Your profile photo sits over the lower-left part of the banner. Anything important there, such as a logo or a line of text, disappears behind your own face. Phones also show a narrower view and can trim the sides. The safe approach:

• Keep the left third of the lower half free of detail.
• Put any text in the centre or right, away from the edges.
• Use large type: the banner is shown much smaller on a phone than on a monitor.

What to put on it

• A calm photo related to your field: a workspace, a city skyline, a site you built, a product you designed. Busy pictures make the profile photo hard to see.
• A short line of text, if any: what you do and for whom, in a few words. Your headline already appears below the banner, so do not repeat it.
• Your company's brand banner, if your employer provides one. Ask for the personal-profile version, not the company page version, because the shapes differ.

Common problems

• Blurry banner: the source was small and has been stretched. Start from a photo at least 1584 pixels wide.
• Text cut off on a phone: move it closer to the centre.
• Colours look dull: very heavy compression. Re-export at a higher quality.

Ratios such as 4:1, 16:9 and 1:1 are explained in image aspect ratios explained. For writing the profile itself, see how to format a LinkedIn post.