The truth about cropping headshots
Much has been written about how to crop your LinkedIn headshot photo and professional headshot. Let’s get to the bottom of the confusion.
Most of our clients need their headshot for LinkedIn. Consider these three things in cropping your headshot for LinkedIn:
- You want the viewer to be able to see into your eyes. Regardless of whether it was Shakespeare or DaVinci who said, “The eyes are the window to the soul,” there is no question that your eyes do indeed reveal a great deal about you.
- Your picture should be cropped and sized exactly per LinkedIn specs – 600 pixels x 600 pixels is what I have found to be the ideal. This ensures it will display correctly, otherwise it can appear low quality, look blurry and might not even enlarge.
- We don’t need to see your whole head, but you do want to crop the image using age-old artistic guidelines. Read this blog post to understand more about this.
Here’s the ongoing debate. You have maybe heard that it’s okay to crop the top of your head in your LinkedIn photo. Well, that’s true for LinkedIn, but after working with marketing communications departments for nearly 30 years, I guarantee you, they need your whole head.
If your head is cropped and your image is placed in a marketing brochure or displayed on a screen, it can look like an error in design or layout. It is especially true when you are photographed on a white background.
LinkedIn Headshots
It works for LinkedIn, however, because LinkedIn creates a natural boundary to avoid that chopped-off look. This is the new LinkedIn format, which puts all profile images into a circle as of January of this year.
I do suggest cropping tighter on LinkedIn, because it gives your image more impact—the viewer can really see your face and look into your eyes. The top of your head is mentally filled in— everyone knows it’s there.
So what’s the truth about cropping headshots?
The truth is that when it comes to cropping headshots, it is not “one size fits all.” Your image should be delivered to you in multiple formats. One LinkedIn-ready plus one with your whole head visible. At KeliComm Headshots, we take it one step further, and give you an additional crop for bios and website use.
