LinkedIn's actual profile photo spec
LinkedIn recommends a square photo at 400×400 pixels for profile photos. That single number covers every place the photo actually appears — the full profile page, the small circular avatar in search results and comments, and the connection-request card — because LinkedIn generates all of those smaller versions from the same square source.
Why cropping it yourself beats letting LinkedIn do it
Upload a non-square photo directly and LinkedIn's own tool will crop it for you — but it crops around the centre of the frame, with no idea where your face actually is. A portrait shot with headroom above you, or a photo where you're slightly off-centre, can come back with the top of your head cut off or your face pushed to one side. Cropping to a square yourself first, with the frame positioned exactly where you want it, avoids that entirely.
How this tool differs from LinkedIn's own upload crop
| LinkedIn's upload crop | This tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Crop position | Centred automatically | You position it, dragging over your face |
| Output size | Resampled by LinkedIn's own pipeline | Locked to exactly 400px before you upload |
| Preview before committing | Limited | Full preview, adjust as many times as you like |
Getting a good result
Start with a photo where your face fills a reasonable portion of the frame already. Cropping a small face out of a large group photo to exactly 400px means stretching very few source pixels across that space, which looks soft. A photo where you're already a meaningful fraction of the image gives the crop more real detail to work with.
Use "Centre the frame" as a starting point, then drag. The square frame opens centred on the photo by default. Drag it directly over your face, or use the corner handles to resize it while keeping the 1:1 ratio locked — the frame won't distort into a rectangle.
Leave a little room above your head and below your shoulders. A crop that's too tight can feel cramped at avatar size; a little breathing room around the edges reads better once LinkedIn shrinks it down for comments and search results.
Format choice for a profile photo
JPEG is the sensible default — small file size at high visual quality, and universally supported. PNG only makes sense if you specifically need transparency, which isn't relevant for a profile photo LinkedIn displays on its own background.
Nothing is uploaded to do this
The crop and the resize to exactly 400px both happen inside your browser using the Canvas API. The photo is never sent to a server, so there's no queue, no daily limit, and no third party seeing the image before you choose to upload it to LinkedIn yourself. Re-encoding through a canvas also strips EXIF metadata — camera model, GPS coordinates, timestamps — from the result automatically.