How to Crop and Size a Headshot for Every Platform

What size should a LinkedIn headshot be?

LinkedIn recommends a square image between 400 by 400 and 7680 by 7680 pixels, with a file size under 8 MB. In practice, 1000 by 1000 or 2000 by 2000 pixels is plenty. A few framing rules make a big difference:

• Face fills 50 to 60 percent of the frame. Head and the top of your shoulders, not your whole torso.
• Leave headroom. A small gap between the top of your hair and the edge of the frame, so the circle crop never clips your head.
• Check the circle. LinkedIn shows a circular preview before you save. Anything in the corners of your square disappears, so keep your face centred.
• Eyes in the upper third. This keeps your face from sinking to the bottom of the circle at thumbnail size.

Remember that most people will see your photo as a tiny circle in a feed or a comment thread, often under 50 pixels wide. Zoom your crop out to thumbnail size and check that you are still recognisable. Tight crops with clean backgrounds win at small sizes.

What about email avatars and chat apps?

Gmail, Outlook, Slack and Teams all accept a square and display a circle, so the same master crop works. Sizes are forgiving:

• Google account photo: minimum 250 by 250 pixels, but upload 1000 by 1000 for sharpness on retina screens.
• Outlook and Microsoft 365: a square at 648 by 648 pixels or larger works well.
• Slack: minimum 512 by 512 pixels, square.

Email avatars render even smaller than LinkedIn thumbnails, sometimes 32 pixels across. This is where a slightly tighter crop helps. If your master crop shows a lot of shoulder, make a second version cropped closer to your face just for chat and email, so your features stay readable at postage-stamp size.

How should you crop a headshot for a company website?

Company sites are the one place where squares are not guaranteed. Team pages use squares, circles, vertical rectangles and occasionally wide cards, depending on the design. Before you crop, look at the existing team page and match what is there. Two guidelines cover most cases:

1. If the site uses squares or circles, send your standard square master at 1500 by 1500 pixels or more. Web teams can always size down.
2. If the site uses vertical portraits, a 4:5 ratio (for example 1200 by 1500 pixels) is the safest bet. It gives the designer room above your head and below your shoulders to fit their template.

When in doubt, supply the largest uncropped version you have and let the web team crop it. A full-size download gives them room to work. This is one reason full-resolution files matter: a headshot generated at businessheadshots.ai downloads at full size, so the same image can be cut down for a website card, a LinkedIn square and a conference speaker page without anything looking stretched.

What size does a headshot need to be for print?

Print is stricter than screens. Screens need pixels, print needs pixels per inch, and the standard for sharp print is 300 DPI. The maths is simple: multiply the printed size in inches by 300.

• Conference programme or badge (2 by 2 inches): 600 by 600 pixels minimum.
• Book jacket or press photo (4 by 5 inches): 1200 by 1500 pixels.
• Banner or poster (8 by 10 inches): 2400 by 3000 pixels.

For print, favour a slightly looser crop than you use online. Printers and designers often need bleed room around the subject, and a photo cropped tight to the hairline gives them nothing to work with. A 4:5 vertical crop with visible shoulders and generous headroom is the classic print headshot format.

How do you get a photo that crops well in the first place?

Cropping can only rearrange what is already there. A photo taken at arm's length in bad light will look like a phone selfie at every size. The fixes are the usual ones: even light on your face, a clean background, camera at eye level, and your head and shoulders filling the frame with margin to spare.

If you do not have a photo like that, you have two routes. A photographer typically charges $150 to $300 for a session and will deliver print-ready files. Or you can upload one selfie to businessheadshots.ai and get a studio-quality headshot in about a minute, with your choice of backdrop, lighting, outfit and expression. You see your own result first with a watermark, free, so you know it actually looks like you before paying anything. That is the honest answer to the usual worry about AI headshots. Pricing starts at $10 for 10 headshots as a one-time payment, and downloads are full resolution, which covers everything in this guide up to a large print.

Quick reference checklist

• Master crop: square, eyes in the upper third, headroom above the hair.
• LinkedIn: square, 1000 to 2000 pixels per side, check the circle preview.
• Email and chat avatars: same square, consider a tighter version for tiny displays.
• Company site: match the team page; 4:5 vertical if unsure, send the largest file you have.
• Print: 300 DPI, so printed inches times 300 equals pixels needed, looser 4:5 crop.
• Always resize copies from one high-resolution original, never upscale.

Get the master crop right once and every platform after that is a two-minute job.