How We Crop and Format Your Headshot for Every Platform...

How We Crop and Format Your Headshot for Every Platform

Here's a problem almost nobody anticipates: you get a beautiful headshot, upload it to LinkedIn, and the platform crops it into a circle that cuts off your chin.

The photograph was fine. The delivery wasn't.

Every platform crops differently, and a file that works perfectly in one frame can be ruined by another. So part of what I deliver is a set of files already cropped correctly for wherever you're actually posting them.

The core principle: shoot wide, crop tight

I shoot with deliberate breathing room around the head. That extra space is what makes multiple crops possible from one frame. A file shot right to the edges has nothing left to give when a platform demands a square or a circle.

This is also why pulling a crop out of a group photo rarely works — there was never any margin to begin with.

LinkedIn

The most important one for most of my clients, and the trickiest, because LinkedIn displays profile photos as a circle.

That circular mask cuts the corners off your square upload. Anything near an edge disappears. The fix is centering the face and leaving generous padding — your head should occupy roughly the middle 60% of the frame, not fill it.

• Recommended: 400 × 400 pixels, minimum 200 × 200

• Square (1:1), displayed as a circle

• JPG or PNG, under 8 MB

I deliver a LinkedIn-specific crop tested against the circular mask, so you can see what it will actually look like before you upload it.

Instagram

Also circular, and displayed small — often at 320 × 320 or less on a phone.

That size constraint changes what works. Fine detail vanishes. What survives is the shape of the face and the strength of the expression, which means the Instagram crop is usually the tightest one I deliver.

• 1:1 square, minimum 320 × 320, upload larger for retina screens

Facebook and X

• Facebook: square, displayed at roughly 170 × 170 on desktop. Upload considerably larger; Facebook's compression is aggressive and a bigger source file survives it better.

• X (Twitter): square, 400 × 400, displayed as a circle.

Your company bio page

Usually the one place with no circular crop and no square requirement — which means it's often where the full, properly composed frame belongs. I'll ask what your site uses. Some want a wide horizontal crop for a team grid, which is a different composition entirely and worth knowing about before we shoot.

Casting platforms

For actors and models, format compliance isn't cosmetic — submissions get rejected for wrong dimensions before a human ever sees them.

• Print standard: 8 × 10 inches, a 4:5 ratio, delivered at 2400 × 3000 pixels / 300 DPI

• Actors Access: JPG only, minimum 600 × 900, file size between roughly 100 KB and 2 MB

• Casting Networks: minimum 600 × 750, 4:5 ratio, JPG or PNG

I upload well above the minimums, because those floors were set for older displays and thumbnails now render on retina tablets.

What you actually receive

A full-resolution master file, a print-ready version, and platform-specific crops for the places you use. Named clearly, so six months from now you're not guessing which file is which.

If you later need a size I didn't deliver, ask. It takes me a few minutes and I'd rather do it than have you crop it badly in a hurry.

Book a session. By appointment, almost anytime. Call or text 602-619-9366, or use the contact page. See pricing or read about what to expect.