Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell headshots. This is the part that comes after you have one, and it costs nothing.
Most people produce a headshot, upload it everywhere at whatever size the file happens to be, and never look at it again. Then it renders badly in three of the six places it lives, and they conclude the photograph was the problem.
It usually is not. It is the crop.
LinkedIn profile. 400 x 400 displayed, up to 800 x 800 when clicked. Square, cropped to a circle. Anything near the edge of the frame is cut, so a photograph framed for print loses your shoulders and part of your hair.
LinkedIn feed and search. Roughly 48 pixels, circular. This is where most impressions actually happen, and at this size there is no detail left — only shape and tone.
Email signature. Typically 80 to 120 pixels wide, often square, and frequently rendered against a background colour you do not control.
Slack and Teams. Small, square, circular crop, shown next to a name at reading size.
A company team page. Whatever the design system says, but almost always a grid, which means your photograph is judged against your colleagues' before it is judged on its own.
Print. Conference badge, business card, press kit. At 300 DPI an eight-inch print needs about 2,400 pixels on the long edge; a business card portrait at 3.5 inches needs around 1,050.
Not six. Two.
A square, tight crop for every screen use. Head and a little shoulder, centred, with room around the head so the circular mask does not clip your hair. Export at 800 x 800 and it will serve every platform above.
A portrait crop at full resolution for print and for anything that wants a rectangle, like a CV in a market that expects a photograph. Keep the original file for this; do not upscale the square one.
Producing both takes two minutes in any editor, including a free one, and it prevents the most common outcome, which is one file stretched or cropped badly by five different systems.
Shrink your square crop to about 50 pixels and put it beside three colleagues' photographs from the same platform.
If your head loses its outline, the problem is tonal separation: your hair and the background sit at similar brightness. Dark hair on mid-grey is the classic version and it is extremely common in generated headshots because the models favour that combination. It is fixable by changing the background rather than reshooting anything.
Use the same photograph everywhere. Recognition compounds. Someone who sees you on LinkedIn, then in Slack, then on a company page has met you three times if it is the same image and once if it is three.