LinkedIn cover photo: why 1584×396 — and why yours looks blurry

2026-09-09

You upload a nice wide photo as your LinkedIn background and it comes out blurry, zoomed, or with the important part hiding behind your profile picture. The fix is a number: the canvas LinkedIn actually wants.

The official spec

LinkedIn's help page ("Add or change the cover image on your profile", checked 2026-08-28) recommends 1584 × 396 pixels for the personal profile cover image, as PNG or JPG — and adds that if your image looks blurry or pixelated, you should choose one with a larger file size. Note this is the personal profile number; company Pages use a different one (1512 × 256).

Why other sizes go wrong

• Too small — LinkedIn stretches it to fill the strip, and stretching is where blur comes from.
• Wrong ratio — 1584 × 396 is 4:1, far wider than a normal photo. Upload a 4:3 image and most of it must be cropped away to fit the strip.
• Over-compressed — a heavily compressed JPG that looked fine at photo proportions shows its artifacts when spread across a wide banner.

Making a banner that lands exactly

Work backwards from the target: crop to 4:1 first, choosing which slice of the image survives, then resize to exactly 1584 × 396. In our tools that's crop with a free ratio (drag it to a wide strip), then resize with width 1584 and height 396. Everything runs in your browser — no upload, and you see the exact frame before committing.

Two placement traps to check before saving

• On the profile page, your round profile photo overlaps the left part of the banner — keep faces and text out of that zone.
• Different screens crop the strip slightly differently — keep anything critical near the center.

What we deliberately don't do

We don't generate "LinkedIn-optimized" versions at several sizes you didn't ask for. One spec, hit exactly, beats five guesses.

The short version

• Personal cover image: 1584 × 396, PNG or JPG (LinkedIn Help, checked 2026-08-28). Company Pages differ.
• Blur = too small or over-compressed; bad crops = wrong ratio.
• Crop to 4:1 first, then resize to exactly 1584 × 396.
• Keep faces and text away from the profile-photo overlap zone.