Preventing Recompression Artifacts on LinkedIn Banners

When creating images for social media, especially banners on platforms like LinkedIn, image quality is paramount. A common pitfall is allowing the platform itself to recompress and resize images, which often leads to unwanted artifacts and pixelation. This post dives into how to optimize image output to prevent LinkedIn from degrading banner quality.

The Problem: Downscaling and Recompression

LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, applies its own compression algorithms to images uploaded by users. This is done to optimize storage and bandwidth. However, when an image's dimensions don't perfectly match the platform's expected size, LinkedIn first rescales the image before compressing it. This resizing step introduces artifacts, which are then amplified by the subsequent compression, resulting in a noticeably lower quality image.

The Solution: Native Resolution Output

The key to avoiding this quality degradation is to render the image at the exact dimensions that LinkedIn expects for its banner. In this case, the target resolution is 1080x1350 pixels. By outputting an image with these native dimensions, we eliminate the need for LinkedIn to rescale it, ensuring that only compression is applied.

Here's a simplified example of how you might configure an image rendering process:

const width = 1080;
const height = 1350;

// Configure the rendering context
const context = {
  width: width,
  height: height,
  deviceScaleFactor: 1 // Ensure no internal scaling
};

// Generate the image
renderImage(context);

// Save the image as PNG (lossless format before upload)
saveImage('linkedin_banner.png');

By setting the deviceScaleFactor to 1, we ensure that the rendering occurs at the precise target resolution, preventing any internal upscaling that might lead to a larger image requiring downscaling by LinkedIn.

The Impact: Cleaner, Sharper Banners

Outputting images at the native resolution of 1080x1350 significantly reduces pixelation and compression artifacts, resulting in cleaner, sharper banners on LinkedIn. This simple optimization step ensures that your visuals are presented at their best, maintaining a professional and polished appearance.