What LinkedIn publishes
LinkedIn documents its limits, so these numbers come from the platform rather than from a blog post.
| Image | Pixels | File |
|---|---|---|
| Personal profile photo | Between 400 x 400 and 7680 x 4320 | Maximum 8MB, PNG or JPG, no GIF (source) |
| Page logo | 268 x 268 minimum, 400 x 400 recommended | Maximum 3 MB, PNG or JPEG (source) |
| Page cover image, the banner strip | 4200 x 700 | Maximum 3 MB, PNG or JPEG |
A square image around 800 x 800 sits well inside the profile photo range: over the 400-pixel minimum with room for a retina display, and nowhere near the 8MB cap.
What Instagram publishes: nothing
Instagram has no public profile picture specification. The numbers that circulate, 320 x 320 and 110 x 110 among them, are measurements people took of the rendered avatar at particular moments. Those render sizes change, and none of them is a rule you can rely on.
The practical approach ignores the folklore. Upload a square image at roughly 1,000 x 1,000 pixels. It exceeds every display size the app currently uses, it re-encodes cleanly, and it survives the next redesign without you touching it again.
Crop square first, then resize
Nearly every avatar slot is a square or a circle, and phone photos are not square. Something has to give, and it is worth deciding what.
The Vaultaire resizer locks the aspect ratio. It never crops and never stretches, so it cannot turn a 4:3 photo into a square. Cropping is a compositional choice, and a tool that guesses where to cut will cut through your chin.
- Crop to a square Use your phone's photo editor or any desktop editor. Choose the 1:1 ratio and place your face slightly above centre, because circular masks trim the corners.
- Resize the square Open the image resizer, enter 1000 for the width, and the height follows automatically. Nothing uploads.
- Check the file size Both platforms cap the file, not just the pixels. When you are over, run the result through the compressor with a ceiling.
Pixels and kilobytes are different problems
A pixel dimension describes how many dots the image holds. A file size describes how many bytes it takes to store them. Changing one does not directly set the other, and platforms usually limit both.
Resize when a form says maximum 400 x 400 pixels. Compress when it says maximum 2 MB. When a form says both, resize first and compress second, because fewer pixels make the size ceiling easy to reach.
Your face, your machine
A profile photo is a picture of your face, usually taken at home or at work, and the original file often carries GPS coordinates and a timestamp. Uploading it to a random resizing site hands both to a stranger.
Vaultaire's resizer runs in your browser, so the image never travels. To check what the original carries before you post it anywhere, open it in the metadata viewer first.
Profile picture FAQ
What size should a LinkedIn profile picture be?
LinkedIn's help page states that the pixel size is between 400 x 400 and 7680 x 4320 pixels, the maximum file size is 8MB, and the file type must be PNG or JPG. GIFs are not supported. A square image around 800 x 800 sits comfortably inside those bounds.
What size is an Instagram profile picture?
Instagram does not publish a specification. Every number circulating online is someone's measurement of the rendered avatar, not a documented rule. Upload a square image at roughly 1,000 x 1,000 pixels and the crop looks right at every display size.
Does resizing crop my photo?
No. The resizer locks the aspect ratio and never crops or stretches. Turning a 4:3 photo into a square is a crop, so do that first in your photo editor, then resize the square result.
What is the LinkedIn banner or cover size?
LinkedIn documents a Page cover image of 4200 x 700 pixels with a maximum file size of 3 MB in PNG or JPEG. Most people call that strip the banner. A personal profile background is a separate image with its own crop, so preview it on desktop and mobile before you commit.
Should I upload a big file or a small one?
Upload comfortably above the minimum and well under the file-size cap. Platforms re-encode what you send, so a slightly larger source gives their encoder more to work with, while an oversized file just wastes the upload.
What files does the resizer accept?
One still JPEG, PNG, or WebP up to 20 MB, 8,192 px per side, and 16,000,000 pixels in total. Animated files get rejected rather than reduced to a first frame.