As you start to take your personal branding more seriously, the photography you use within your business to promote your business will become more important. With your LinkedIn Profile, you can have a headshot photo AND a background image, which should have the same look and feel as your website and the banner pages on your social media profiles. Here’s how you can make the most of this feature for your LinkedIn Profile.
The background photo appears above the top section of your profile. Like many of the key features on your LinkedIn Profile, you can’t edit your background photo from a mobile device, but you can make changes from your desktop. While 60% of users access LinkedIn from their profiles, if you are dealing with corporate decision makers, I encourage you to make any profile changes from your desktop, and then view these from your mobile, so you understand how your public profile can be viewed from both options.
If you have a tablet, also check how your profile looks from LinkedIn’s App or via the linkedin.com website. As with most browsers, the display of the image may change based on the size of your web browser window and screen resolution.
- Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Click View profile.
- Click Update background photo at the top of your profile and select an image from your computer to upload.
- Click Upload photo.
- Click Save.
Dimension requirements for background images for your LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn specifies the following requirements for background images:
- File type JPG, GIF or PNG
- No larger than 4MB
- Recommended pixel dimensions are 1584 x 396x
If your background image appears blurry or pixelated, LinkedIn suggests choosing an image with a file size as close to the maximum as possible, as images with larger file sizes typically look better. Photos will also look better than images with logos.
Troubleshooting background images for your LinkedIn profile
If your image is still blurry or pixelated, LinkedIn suggests you may want to run it through a compression tool such as Trimage for Windows or ImageOptim for Mac before uploading it to LinkedIn, but they can not provide support for use of these third party tools.
Please note that only Premium members have access to the preloaded image gallery. If you previously uploaded an image and disabled Premium Profile in order to hide it, your image may become visible once more.