Category Archives: LinkedIn

How to Prepare Your Photo for LinkedIn

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How to Prepare Your Photo for LinkedIn

So you have a photo of yourself that you like. It looks professional and projects the desired image. You’ve checked that it doesn’t appear on the five don’ts of LinkedIn list. What now?

If you have photographs provided by us, you don’t need to worry about any of this; all packages include images processed for LinkedIn so you can upload directly. If, however, you’re using your own photos read on…

1. Cropping

The first stage is to crop the image. Social media profiles usually have a square image. If you upload a rectangular image, it will ask you to choose a square for the thumbnail.

There are usually two temptations here; the first is to include the whole head and shoulders, like a passport photo, the second is to position the face right in the centre of the image.

A more ‘balanced’ approach can come from using the rule of thirds. This is a classic compositional tool used in all graphic work.

Draw an imaginary ‘noughts and crosses’ board on your image, and compose using those lines. If you have horizontal or vertical lines in your composition, place them on the lines you have drawn. If you have more ‘point-like’ objects, they look balanced if they are placed on one of the four points where the lines intersect.

In this case, we’re going to place the line of the eyes along the top of the horizontal lines.

It’s a matter of taste whether you are happy with the top of the head being ‘chopped off’. But when you consider how small the LinkedIn photo will be, it’s worth getting in close.

1b. Further Notes on Cropping

As you look through the images in LinkedIn you may see some very creative composition and cropping. There’s nothing wrong with that… but it’s well worth knowing the ‘rules’ before you start breaking them!

Creativity is often about breaking the established rules in a purposeful manner.You must know why you’re breaking a rule, and what the implications are. Ignorance of the rules mustn’t be mistaken for breaking them with purpose!

2. Resizing and Sharpening

The cropped image is still probably pretty large. There’s no point uploading an image that’s 1800 pixels wide when it’s going to be placed into a tiny window. More importantly, if you don’t resize the image LinkedIn will do it for you, losing detail. It’s better to keep the process under your control.

The maximum size that LinkedIn will display is 500×500 pixels, but in most cases where the photo is shown, it will appear smaller. Since you only get to upload one image for a number of sizes, go for something in the region of 400×400 pixels as a happy medium.

Once your resize is done, it’s time to sharpen. Using the ‘unsharp mask’ tool gives the best results it it’s available. Be careful, though; oversharpening looks worse than not doing it at all.

You want the details to shine out of the image without the edges becoming too pronounced. Note, particularly, the shine in the eyes on the centre image. On the overdone image, the hair and ear are starting to look pretty strange.

3. Image Quality

Now you’ve made the effort to prepare your image to look its best, please don’t mess it up at the last stage; saving your image.

Most graphic software will allow you to set an image quality on saving. The reason for this is that computer images (in jpg format, to be accurate) use what’s called ‘lossy compression’. This makes the image files take up less room on your hard drive than they would if they were in full detail; but the downside is that they do lose that detail.

With a small image like a profile picture, there is no real reason to use a low quality setting. The image files don’t take up a lot of space in any case. But your image software may have a default setting that is too low.

Notice that as the quality value drops, the image becomes more ‘blocky’. Detail is lost into what we call ‘artefacts’. These low quality pictures are hugely common on LinkedIn and other profiles. Look out for small blocks of miscoloured or mis-shapen image.

Note that some software will have a ‘compression’ option. This is just the opposite; make sure the compression is low enough that the quality is suitable.

And We’re Done!

Good work! Now you know how to take an image and make it look its best on LinkedIn. When you spot other people with non-ideal crops; or blocky, low-quality images you can now point them in this direction.

Huge thanks to Darrel Brookes of UCR Consultants for permission to use his headshot in these examples. And thanks to you, our readers, also! Please share your questions, comments and other thoughts below… let’s talk…

Photos Receive 10% More Attention

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Photos Receive 10% More Attention than Biographies

An interesting article by Jakob Nielsen (“the guru of web page useability”) shows a case where photographs of team members received 10% more attention on a page than the written biographies next to them. This is despite the fact that each photo only took up 32% of the space taken by a biography.

People buy from people, and they want to see people on your website!

Even more interestingly, the article also shows a ‘stock’ photo being almost completely ignored by the viewer. These are the photos bought from an online library to ‘fluff up’ a website, but without adding any informative content.

The viewer is looking, consciously or unconsciously, for information about your company. They will make snap decisions while viewing your photos—are these the kind of people I would want to buy from?

An article from Business Insider goes into The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make When Choosing A LinkedIn Photo. The same decisions apply to “Meet The Team” photographs.

After identifying the problems, they then go on to identify 5 tips to choose (or have created) the most appropriate photographs for professional use. Naturally, at The Business Portrait Company, we can help you with several of these points…

Five Tips

1. Dress to reflect the atmosphere of the profession that you’re in or hope to join.

Our What to Wear? guide gives general advice to ensure you are suitably dressed, both for the camera and for the passage of time. You, the subject, will have to decide on exactly how dressed up, or down, you want to appear; but the guide will help you in your decisions.

2. Choose a picture that conveys your energy and personality.

This is the key to all portrait photography. An inexperienced photographer, or “mate with a camera” may be fumbling with technical issues, or nervous about the shoot – this will have a knock-on effect to you, the sitter. Our photographers are technically proficient, meaning that all of their attention is on you; making you look great!

3. Be aware of your posture. Sit up straight. Good posture signifies confidence and competence.

Again, our photographers will pose you. We ask you to sit on the edge of the chair because we know it encourages you to sit up and not slouch. We make conversation with you and find out what brings out your confidence, what makes you sit two inches taller, what makes your eyes light up. Then in a split second, we capture that moment.

4. Make sure your eyes are relaxed and you have a smile on your face.

It is so common to see otherwise good photos ruined by a look of anxiety on the face of the sitter. This is often caused by an inexperienced or ‘bossy’ photographer. We realise that you’re in an unfamiliar situation and do all we can to relax you, to warm you up to the camera, to get you to forget you’re being photographed. That’s when the eyes will relax.

And we never demand that you smile. We’d rather a relaxed, neutral, confident expression than a grinning lunatic. If you’re naturally smily, the smile will come across anyway. If not, you will merely look confident and happy.

5. Posting a photo is a must, especially for women who have married and changed their names. Or if you have a common name such as “Nicole Williams,” since there can be several people with the same name on the site.

So, what are you waiting for!

Packages that may interest you:

1. Business Photos – For ‘meet the team’, web and print use.
2. Business Portraits for LinkedIn – For social networking profiles, LinkedIn, Twitter and more.
3. Corporate Photos – For business owners who want bespoke images that tell the story.

Holiday Snaps

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Holiday Snaps

I went through my LinkedIn connections yesterday. Of 225 connections, I noticed that 26% had no picture at all, and a heady 8% had a holiday snap as their profile picture. It’s very nice to know that people have been to Macchu Picchu or stroked an Alpaca, but it really deserves some thought as to the message being put forward.

You wouldn’t turn up to a business meeting wearing your Hawaiian shirt, straw hat and sunglasses; but you would turn up to the biggest business meeting in the world wearing them?

That’s right; LinkedIn is, essentially, the biggest business meeting in the world. As you look at your competitors out there, the ones who stand out for the right reasons are those who have a high-quality professional profile photograph. If you want to stand out for the wrong reasons, please continue to use the photo of you with the Alpaca, or the pint of beer, or the Bellagio Fountains.

Remember, a professional photograph doesn’t have to be a stuffy photograph. But it shows that you have gone to the trouble to project the best image you can when you’re attending—I’ll say it just once more—the biggest business meeting in the world.

To book your headshot today, call 01509 808 689 or email ku.oc.ynapmoctiartropssenisubehtnull@spansyadiloheromon.

(Naturally, if you run or work for a travel company, please continue using your picture with the Alpaca, as long as it has been well taken)