LinkedIn Carousel Size and Dimensions

“What size should my LinkedIn carousel be?” sounds like a question with one number as the answer. It is not, for two reasons. First, LinkedIn has two different formats that people both call a carousel, and they behave differently. Second, LinkedIn resizes what you upload to fit the feed, so the shape of your pages decides how they look far more than the pixel count does.

This page covers both formats, the shapes that actually display well, and the specific mistakes that cause text to be cut off. Where a hard limit exists but changes from time to time, it says so and points you at LinkedIn’s own help pages rather than inventing a number.

Which carousel are we talking about — a document post or a multi-image post?

This is the fork in the road, and getting it wrong is why size advice you read elsewhere sometimes does not match what you see on screen.

• A document post. You upload one file — usually a PDF (Portable Document Format, the fixed-layout file type) — and LinkedIn renders it in the feed as a small viewer people swipe through. This is what most people mean when they say “LinkedIn carousel”. Every page lives inside a single file.
• A multi-image post. You upload several separate image files in one post, and the reader swipes between them. No PDF involved. Kalovio publishes 2 to 9 images in one of these.

What aspect ratio should a LinkedIn carousel be?

Aspect ratio — the shape of a page, written as width:height — is the decision that matters. Two shapes dominate, and for good reason.

Square, 1:1. Commonly exported at 1080×1080 pixels. It is the safe default. It looks the same on a phone and on a laptop, it never becomes awkwardly tall, and it is the shape most carousel templates ship with.

Portrait, 4:5. Commonly exported at 1080×1350 pixels. It takes up more vertical space in the feed than a square, which means it fills more of the screen while someone is looking at it. Many creators prefer it for that reason. The trade-off is that on a wide desktop screen a tall page can feel cramped, and you have more empty space to fill with something worth reading.

Landscape, 16:9. This is the one to avoid for carousels. A wide page shrinks to a thin strip in the feed column on a phone, and your text shrinks with it. Landscape works for a slide deck projected on a wall. It works badly here.

The feed column on LinkedIn is narrow, and it is narrower still on a phone. Whatever you upload gets scaled down to fit that width. A square or portrait page keeps a useful amount of height after that scaling. A landscape page does not.

Why do square and portrait work best on a phone?

Most people scroll LinkedIn on a phone, held upright. That single fact drives every sensible size decision, and it is worth being concrete about what it means.

On an upright phone, horizontal space is the scarce resource. Your carousel gets a fixed, fairly narrow width and then takes whatever height its ratio gives it. A landscape page scaled to that width ends up short, so a heading that looked comfortable in your design tool becomes genuinely small type on glass.

A square gets a reasonable height. A 4:5 portrait gets more. That extra height is not decoration — it is the room your words need in order to stay readable after scaling.

The practical test costs nothing: publish it, or send yourself the file, and look at it on your own phone at arm’s length. If you have to bring the phone closer to read a line, the type is too small, regardless of what any size guide says.

What page size should I use for a PDF carousel?

Set a custom page size in your design tool rather than accepting the default. A4 and US Letter are both portrait, but they are taller and thinner than 4:5, which leaves you designing for a shape nobody optimises for.

Three rules cover almost every case:

• Pick one page size and use it for the whole file. LinkedIn’s viewer sizes itself around the document. Mixing a square page with a portrait page in the same PDF gives you a viewer that has to fit the tallest page, leaving empty bands around the others.
• Design in the ratio, export at a sensible resolution. If your tool works in millimetres or points rather than pixels, that is fine — a 200×200 mm page is still 1:1. What matters is that text stays crisp after LinkedIn re-renders it, so export at a decent quality rather than the smallest file your tool offers.
• Embed or outline your fonts. A PDF that refers to a font it does not carry can be re-rendered with a substitute, which changes line breaks and can push a line off the page. Most design tools embed fonts by default when exporting to PDF. If yours offers a “convert text to outlines” option, that removes the risk entirely, at the cost of no longer being able to edit the text later.

What size should the images in a multi-image post be?

Here the rule is stricter than for a PDF, because each image is its own file and LinkedIn has to fit them all into one shared frame.

Make every image exactly the same dimensions. If image one is 1080×1350 and image two is 1600×900, the set will not swipe cleanly — you get inconsistent framing, bands of empty space, or unexpected cropping, depending on the device. A mixed-shape set is one of the most common reasons a multi-image post looks unfinished.

Pick 1:1 or 4:5, apply it to all of them, and export them all at the same pixel dimensions. If one of your images is a screenshot with a different native shape, place it on a square or portrait background in your brand colour rather than uploading it raw.

On how many: Kalovio publishes 2 to 9 images in one multi-image post. LinkedIn’s own maximum has changed over time and can differ between the mobile app and the website, so if you want to push past nine, check LinkedIn’s current help page rather than trusting any blog post, this one included.

How do I stop my text being cut off?

Cut-off text is almost never a resolution problem. It is a margin problem, and it has three specific causes.

The page counter sits over your page. On document posts LinkedIn overlays a small page indicator near the bottom of the viewer. Anything you place in that strip — a footer, your handle, the last line of a paragraph — will end up underneath it. Keep the bottom of every page clear.

Your margins are too tight. Leave a generous safe area on all four sides — roughly a tenth of the page width is a reasonable starting point — and keep every word inside it. Full-bleed backgrounds and images are fine. Full-bleed text is not.

You fitted the text to the page instead of the page to the text. When a paragraph does not fit, the tempting fix is to shrink the type. Add a page instead. A carousel with eleven readable pages beats one with eight cramped ones, and extra pages cost nothing.

What are the actual file limits?

Two limits you can rely on from our side: Kalovio accepts uploads up to 20 MB per file, for images and documents alike, and it keeps up to 100 files in your library on a rolling 30-day basis. If your PDF is bigger than 20 MB it is almost certainly carrying uncompressed photographs, and compressing them will make the post load faster for readers as well.

A quick checklist before you post

• One aspect ratio — 1:1 or 4:5 — applied to every page or every image in the set.
• No landscape pages.
• Nothing important in the bottom strip, where the page counter lands.
• A clear safe margin on all four sides, with no text touching an edge.
• Fonts embedded or converted to outlines in the PDF.
• Checked on an actual phone before publishing, not just on your monitor.

How do I actually publish it?

Once the file is right, publishing is the straightforward part. LinkedIn’s own composer takes a document or a set of images directly. If you would rather write the caption and publish from a chat with Claude or ChatGPT, Kalovio connects your LinkedIn account through LinkedIn’s official sign-in and can publish a single image, a 2-to-9 image multi-image post, or a PDF document post, showing you a preview you have to approve before anything goes out.

Size is the part of a carousel that is easy to get right and easy to get wrong by accident. Pick a shape, keep it consistent, leave room at the edges, and look at it on a phone. That covers nearly all of it.