Optimizing LinkedIn Banner Generation to Avoid Recompression Artifacts
When creating images for social media, especially for professional platforms like LinkedIn, image quality is paramount. Recompression artifacts can significantly degrade the visual appeal of banners, leading to a less professional look. Here's how we tackled this issue in the devlog-ist/landing project, which, among other things, generates social media banners.
The Problem
Our initial approach involved rendering LinkedIn banners at a 2x deviceScaleFactor, resulting in a 2160x2700 PNG image. While this seemed like a good idea to ensure high resolution, LinkedIn's processing pipeline introduced an unwanted side effect. Before applying JPEG compression, LinkedIn downscaled the image. This resizing step, followed by compression, introduced noticeable pixelation and artifacts, diminishing the banner's visual quality.
The Solution
The key insight was to match the exact dimensions that LinkedIn expects for its banners: 1080x1350 pixels. By rendering the image at this native resolution, we eliminated the need for LinkedIn to perform any resizing. This meant that the image would only undergo JPEG compression, avoiding the pixelation caused by the downscaling process.
Here's a simplified example of how the image generation parameters were adjusted:
const width = 1080;
const height = 1350;
// Generate the image with the specified dimensions
generateImage(width, height);
By directly targeting the expected dimensions, we bypassed the problematic resizing step and maintained a much higher level of image quality.
The Result
The resulting banners exhibited significantly fewer compression artifacts, leading to a cleaner, more professional appearance on LinkedIn. This optimization highlights the importance of understanding the target platform's image processing pipeline and tailoring image generation accordingly. Always aim to provide images in the precise dimensions expected by the platform to minimize unnecessary processing and maintain optimal quality.
