LinkedIn Document Carousel Posting — Quality is TERRIBLE

Hi all! Back with another LI question; I asked a question before and followed steps of transferring PDF to PNG then back again, and even creating in Canva, but my PDFs are still looking very low quality online.

I find other PDFs that DO look good in the feed and download them to try to see what is different, but am still lost at what I’m doing wrong.

Does anyone have steps they take in order to preserve this? Any guides/tips out there that maybe I’m missing? Thanks in advance!! I am driving my designers up a wall having them re-make and re-do everything :frowning:

Another PDF LI that looks good.pdf (4.3 MB)
My PDF That Doesn’t Look Good (2.8 MB)
Netflix PDF that looks good.pdf (23.4 MB)

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The file size, the resolution, I’ve tried it all. My designers are currently creating assets in Figma and exporting as high res PNG files, and they’ve even tried to export PDFs through Figma as well, and we’re still running into quality issues.

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Interesting that your PDF is so much smaller in size than your examples

I’ve tried with a larger file too, and same thing :frowning:

@nico when I download it…it looks okay to me! @eternalkaz can you try and see what you think??

I don’t see any quality issues with the one I downloaded.

I don’t believe you’ll find the issue with the PDFs, as you’ll be downloading the pristine image I would think. I took the liberty to scour the internet for your LinkedIn posts @nico and I do see what you mean.

This is what the PDFs look like vs the post itself @deb

image

Here’s one in fullscreen mode on LinkedIn:

You can see the immense difference in grainyness that the image has vs the PDF downloaded. It would lead me to believe that there has something to do with LinkedIn compressing the image. The other PDFs that do look good must be doing something different (although I did not find the original posts for those)

Something I decided to try and look at, and I’m sure there are better ways is to look at the sizes of the images but here are some pictures I got while uploading them to an image processing software. And my sizes could be wrong of course I suppose.

Also here are the official carousel sizes from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn carousel post sizes

LinkedIn carousel post in square: 1080 x 1080
LinkedIn carousel post in portrait: 1920 x 1080
LinkedIn carousel best format: PDF
LinkedIn carousel PDF file size: 100 MB (maximum)

Your PDF size:
image

Their PDF size:
image

Could there be a aspect ratio issue? Maybe. LinkedIn’s 1920x1080 is a 16:9 ratio, but neither of the images above have that ratio.

What I can see is that their images are slightly smaller than yours. Unsure if that could be the reason why.

Your aspect based on numbers in the image: 625:781
Their aspect based on numbers in the image: 1125:1406

Thank you so much for your help! I will get all this info to our designers to see what they can do here; I appreciate you taking the time to look into this!

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@eternalkaz I found the original link to the Netflix PDF that looks great: Pretty Little Marketer on LinkedIn: Inside Wednesday's VIRAL marketing strategy 👀 | 95 comments

For reference then, here are how different they look based on not being logged in on firefox vs logged into LinkedIn on Chrome.

Not logged into LinkedIn:
image

Logged into LinkedIn:

You can see how the quality differs and how even the “good” pdf is also grainy. I think it may be because its loading the whole thing somehow when I’m logged in vs not. Also, I went back to look at your post while logged in, even got the url for the post and went to just that post. But your carousel does not open up like theirs when logged into LinkedIn.

Thank you so much, I appreciate your help! I wish they could standardize this and provide concrete guidelines on the ideal file size, dimensions, etc. because each one I come across is different :frowning: I think I will try to re-create in Canva or have the designers do that. Thank you!

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I assume they try to accommodate whatever size they get but if its a weird aspect ratio it may get messed up. Next time you re-create it in canva try to keep it in a 16:9 ratio and let us know how it turns out!

Or if its a square, 1:1 since the max is 1080x1080.

I linked in the previous post above their “official” (or what I would consider official) guidelines since it was on linkedin itself.

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I have tried this 1125 x 1406 size with a 300 DPI resolution, and I have also rasterized each font. Consequently, the quality has noticeably improved.

I assume its got something to do with scaling, maybe turning the pdf into a vector image might help. Unsure though.