Image sizes that actually work on LinkedIn, Instagram and in email
The sizes each platform crops to, the one that gets your banner cut in half on a phone, and how to resize without the picture going soft.
Every platform crops. The trouble is that each one crops differently on a phone than on a laptop, so a banner that looks balanced while you are making it can lose a third of itself, usually the third with your name in it.
Two rules cover most of it. Keep anything important away from the edges, and give the platform more pixels than it shows rather than fewer.
The sizes to use
- LinkedIn profile photo: 400 by 400 pixels, square, shown as a circle.
- LinkedIn cover: 1584 by 396 pixels. The middle third is what survives on a phone.
- Instagram post: 1080 by 1080 square, or 1080 by 1350 for the taller crop that takes more of the screen.
- Instagram story: 1080 by 1920, with the top and bottom 250 pixels kept clear of text.
- Email signature: 320 pixels wide at most, and under 50 KB so it does not trip spam filters.
- Open Graph image for a link preview: 1200 by 630.
Why a resized photo looks soft, and how to avoid it
Enlarging invents pixels that were never there, and no tool is honest enough to be good at it. Always start from the largest original you have. If the only copy you have is small, crop tighter instead of scaling up: a smaller sharp picture reads better than a large blurry one.
File size, which is a separate problem
A correctly sized image can still be a 6 MB file if it came straight from a camera. Compress after resizing. For photographs, JPEG or WebP at around eighty percent quality is invisible to the eye and a fraction of the size.
Transparent backgrounds and the wrong format
PNG keeps transparency and is the right choice for a logo. JPEG does not, and a transparent logo saved as JPEG arrives with a black or white box around it. WebP does both and is smaller than either, but a few older email clients still do not display it, so signatures are safer as PNG.
Common questions
What size should my LinkedIn banner text be?
Keep the text inside the middle 1000 pixels of the 1584 width and at least 60 pixels tall. Anything smaller is unreadable on a phone, which is where most people will see it.
Why does Instagram make my photo look worse?
It re-compresses whatever you upload. Giving it a file that is already at the right dimensions and lightly compressed leaves less for it to do, and the result holds up better.
Does image size affect page speed?
More than almost anything else on a page. A single unoptimised hero photograph can outweigh all the code on the page put together.
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