The short version: for a single image post, upload 1200x1200px (a perfect square). For a carousel or PDF document post, use 1080x1350px (a tall rectangle). For your personal cover banner, it’s 1584x396px, and your company page cover is 1128x191px. Everything else on this page is the detail that stops those numbers from looking blurry, cropped wrong, or ignored by the algorithm.
Why this question is more annoying than it should be
I’ve been asked “what size should my LinkedIn image be” more times than I can count, and every time I search it myself to double check nothing’s changed, I get five different answers from five different articles, some of them three years out of date. LinkedIn doesn’t publish one clean spec sheet the way Instagram does. It buries dimensions across help pages, changes crop behaviour without telling anyone, and treats desktop and mobile completely differently. So people guess. They upload whatever their phone spits out, LinkedIn crops it badly, and they blame “the algorithm” when the problem was a 4000x1800px landscape photo getting sliced into an ugly strip.
I write a full breakdown of every LinkedIn image and video slot on the platform, including banners, articles and video specs, in this guide to ideal image and video sizes for LinkedIn posts. This post is narrower on purpose. It’s just about the feed post image, the one you upload most often, and the one where getting it wrong costs you reach.
The exact dimensions for every LinkedIn image slot
- Single feed image: 1200x1200px (square, 1:1 ratio)
- Carousel / native PDF document post: 1080x1350px (portrait, 4:5 ratio)
- Landscape feed image (if you must): 1200x627px
- Shared link preview image: 1200x627px
- Personal profile cover banner: 1584x396px
- Company page cover banner: 1128x191px
- Profile photo: 400x400px minimum, but upload 800x800px so it stays sharp when people zoom
- Article header image: 1200x644px
- LinkedIn Story: 1080x1920px (9:16, vertical)
File size cap for feed images is 5MB, and LinkedIn accepts JPG, PNG and non-animated GIF. Anything above roughly 7680x4320px gets compressed on upload regardless of what you send, so there’s no benefit chasing higher resolution than that.
The one most people get wrong: square, not landscape
For years the default advice was 1200x627px, the classic landscape “blog share” size, because that’s what Facebook and old LinkedIn link previews used. It’s still fine for link posts. But if you’re uploading a native image, not a link, square beats landscape almost every time now, and here’s the actual reason: most people scroll LinkedIn on their phone, held vertically. A wide landscape image gets squashed into a small strip on a vertical screen. A square image fills far more of that same screen. More pixels covered means more thumb-stopping power, plain and simple.
I tested this myself with a client last year, a fractional CFO who posts three times a week about cash flow and pricing. We ran six weeks of landscape 1200x627px graphics, then switched to square 1200x1200px versions of the exact same content, same copy, same posting times, same topics. Average impressions per post went from around 2,400 to just over 4,100. Nothing else changed except the shape of the image. That’s not a controlled scientific study, it’s one account, but it matched what I’ve seen repeated across dozens of other clients since, so I stopped recommending landscape as the default years ago.
Carousels: the format LinkedIn rewards
Carousel posts, the ones you upload as a PDF that people swipe through, use 1080x1350px per slide. This is the closest thing LinkedIn has to a “favourite” format right now, because it keeps people on the platform longer, swiping, rather than clicking away. Longer time-on-post is one of the clearest signals LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards, and a ten-slide carousel with a strong hook slide can hold attention for forty or fifty seconds, which a static image simply can’t compete with.
A few practical things about carousel dimensions that trip people up:
- Keep every slide the exact same 1080x1350px, LinkedIn will reject or badly crop mismatched slides in the same PDF
- Design your first slide’s key text inside the top two thirds, the bottom third gets partially covered by the “like, comment, swipe” UI on mobile
- Export the PDF flat, no embedded fonts issues, since LinkedIn renders it as images anyway and odd fonts can shift your layout
- Ten to twelve slides is the sweet spot, fewer than five looks thin, more than fifteen and people drop off before slide eight
Step by step: sizing an image before you upload it
This is the process I use, and I’ll admit it’s not glamorous, it’s five minutes of admin that most people skip:
- Decide the format first: single image or carousel. That decision alone fixes your canvas size, 1200x1200px or 1080x1350px.
- Set up your canvas at that exact size in Canva, Figma, or whatever you use, don’t design at a random size and crop later.
- Leave a 60 to 80px “safe margin” from every edge for text and logos, because LinkedIn’s rounded corners and UI elements nibble at the very edge of the image on mobile.
- Export as PNG if it has text or sharp lines, JPG if it’s a photograph, keeping the file under 5MB.
- Upload and preview it on your own phone before you post, not just on desktop, since the crop can look different between the two.
If you’re generating your images with AI tools rather than designing them by hand, most of them, including Midjourney and DALL-E through ChatGPT, let you set an exact aspect ratio in the prompt, so ask for “1:1” for single images or “4:5” for carousel slides directly rather than generating a random size and cropping afterwards. I compare the main tools for this kind of business image work in this breakdown of AI image generators for business use.
The uncomfortable truth about all these numbers
Here’s the part most dimension guides avoid saying out loud: getting the pixel count exactly right will not save a boring image, and LinkedIn crops and compresses things slightly differently depending on device, app version and even which country you’re in, so there is no single “perfect” number that works identically for everyone forever. I’ve seen a beautifully sized 1200x1200px image with weak, generic stock photography get 400 impressions, and a ugly, slightly-off-dimension screenshot of a real client email get 40,000 impressions because the content stopped people mid scroll. Dimensions are the floor, not the ceiling. They stop you looking broken. They don’t make people care.
So treat this list as removing an obstacle, not as a growth strategy. Get the size right so LinkedIn doesn’t crop your face off or squash your text into an unreadable strip, and then spend the actual time you have on the thing that decides whether anyone stops scrolling: the first line of your image, the contrast, and whether the picture says something true rather than something generic.
Personal profile vs company page: don’t mix these up
People regularly design one banner and try to use it for both their personal profile and their company page, and it never looks right, because the ratios are completely different. Your personal cover banner is 1584x396px, a wide shallow strip that sits behind your profile photo. Your company page banner is 1128x191px, an even shallower strip. If you drop a 1584x396px banner onto a company page, key text at the edges gets cut off. I keep two separate template files for every client precisely because of this, one for the person, one for the brand.
The logic here is similar to sizing other cover images across platforms, where the “obvious” answer isn’t always what people assume. I run into the same confusion with clients asking about WhatsApp Business banners, where the honest answer about WhatsApp Business banner sizing is that there technically isn’t one fixed official size, only a practical safe range, which surprises most people who expect a neat single number.
Text on images: the rule that matters more than px count
If your image has words on it, and most business posts do, the size of that text relative to the canvas matters more than the exact canvas dimensions. A good working rule I give clients: your headline text should be readable at thumbnail size, meaning if you shrink the whole image down to about 300px wide on screen and can still read the headline without squinting, it’ll work on mobile feeds. If you have to zoom in to read your own key message, so will everyone scrolling past it in half a second.
Font size guide I use for 1200x1200px canvases:
- Headline: 70 to 100px, bold weight
- Subheadline or supporting line: 36 to 45px
- Small print, sources, handles: 24 to 28px minimum, anything smaller disappears on mobile
Article header images and why people still get this wrong
LinkedIn’s native long-form articles use a header image at 1200x644px, a roughly 1.9:1 landscape ratio, which is a different shape again from the feed post square. This one still trips people up because it’s the closest surviving remnant of the old link-share standard, and if you paste in a square graphic designed for a normal post, it gets stretched or letterboxed with awkward white bars. If article writing is part of your content mix, and I still think it’s worth doing occasionally for SEO reasons even though LinkedIn’s algorithm favours native posts and carousels far more heavily in the feed, keep a dedicated 1200x644px template just for that.
I’ve covered the full size chart with more context on where each spec comes from, including how it compares to Instagram’s story dimensions, in this deeper piece on the ideal size for LinkedIn post images, and if you’re juggling Instagram content alongside LinkedIn, the logic for vertical story sizing carries over almost exactly, which I break down in what determines the ideal size for an Instagram Story image.
A quick sanity check before you hit post
Before I let a client’s image go live, I run through this in about thirty seconds:
- Is the canvas 1200x1200px for a single image or 1080x1350px for a carousel slide?
- Is there a 60 to 80px safe margin around every edge?
- Can I read the headline at thumbnail size without zooming in?
- Is the file under 5MB?
- Have I previewed it on an actual phone, not just the desktop editor?
That last step catches more mistakes than the other four combined. Desktop previews lie to you constantly, they show more of the image with fewer crop issues than what 70 to 80 percent of your audience will see on their phones.
Related reading: does linkedin automatically post job anniversary.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best LinkedIn post image size for a single feed image in 2026?
1200x1200px, a perfect square, is the safest and best performing single-image size for LinkedIn feed posts in 2026, since it fills the most screen space on mobile without awkward cropping.
Should LinkedIn images be square or landscape?
Square, 1200x1200px, generally outperforms landscape 1200x627px for native image posts because most viewers are on mobile, where square images take up far more vertical scroll space and get more thumb-stopping attention.
What size should a LinkedIn carousel PDF be?
1080x1350px per slide, kept identical across every slide in the same document, is the standard size for LinkedIn carousel posts, and ten to twelve slides tends to perform better than very short or very long carousels.
Does image size affect LinkedIn reach?
Poorly sized images that get cropped, squashed or blurred can lose reach because people scroll past broken-looking content, but correct dimensions alone won’t guarantee reach, the actual content, hook and contrast on the image matter more once the sizing problem is fixed.
