Wide Corporate Portrait: Horizontal Ratio, Negative Space and the Website Frame

What Size Should a Horizontal Corporate Photo for a Website Be? (2026)

The short answer: a horizontal 3:2 ratio, a 1800 × 1200 pixel JPEG. The size is decided by layout rather than by any regulation — the top band of a website, the cover slide of a presentation and a press-kit portrait are all boxes that run wide, and when a square file is placed in one of them the browser either cuts the edges away or blows the face up. A width of 1800 pixels carries a full-width hero band even on a high-density screen; if you need less, scaling the file down is free, while the reverse is not possible.

Why 3:2 and not 16:9: because 3:2 is not the widest ratio but the widest USABLE base. You can take a 3:2 file, cut it down from the height and land on 16:9, on 21:9 or on whatever strip your own template asks for; the opposite direction does not exist, because cutting never produces new width. That is why the ratio was chosen from the base up: one file should feed several layouts instead of one reshoot per layout. The same logic applies on the pixel side — 1800 pixels is not a ceiling but a floor that stretches downwards.

The physical equivalent is 60 × 40 mm and four of them fit a 10 × 15 sheet; practical for a press-kit file, a desk card or an event programme. That measurement has no official basis, and precisely because it has none we did not open a size page for it: since no institution accepts or rejects a corporate portrait, writing a "document size" row would be false. If you are genuinely looking up millimetre-to-pixel conversions for documents, the sizes guide is the right place, and for the corporate line as a whole, the corporate portrait guide.

Why Does Cropping a Square Not Give You a Wide Frame?

Because cropping is a subtraction. The only way to move a square file to 3:2 is to cut from the top and the bottom; the width stays exactly what it was. So if you hold a 1200 × 1200 profile frame, a 3:2 crop hands you 1200 × 800: the ratio has gone horizontal, but the room beside the person has not grown by a single pixel. What a website hero and a slide cover want is not the ratio but that room — the area where a headline, a subheading and a button will sit. That area is only created at capture, by stepping back from the person.

The cost of cropping has also been measured, and it is not small. On 84 corporate frames produced as squares we ran the same operation in the vertical direction: a 3:4 crop takes the median quarter of the shoulder span, and in 3 of the 84 frames it cuts into the head band as well. In the horizontal direction the claim is not a measurement but plain geometry, and it is sharper still: what is cut is height, and what is gained is nothing. Both results land in the same place — a crop is not a ratio converter, it is an information eraser.

The right route is to set the crop to 3:2 from the start: the crop box is fixed to the horizontal ratio before the composition is computed, so the distance between the person and the edge of the frame becomes part of the delivered file. For the same reason a square remains a correct base — only for other jobs. Profile fields and circular avatars need a square (LinkedIn profile photo), and a square is also the right choice for a company team grid (team photos guide); the portrait box on a CV is a third ratio (CV photo). The three ratios are not crops of one another but three separate outputs.

Where Does the Negative Space Come From, and Where Does the Headline Go?

The negative space appears symmetrically on both sides of the person. The crop box is aligned to the centre of the face, and any deviation from that centre raises a warning in the composition check; the delivered file is therefore a centred wide portrait rather than an off-centre composition with the person on the left. We say this plainly, because a page promising otherwise would be describing something the product does not do. What you gain is the ratio itself and the sum of the room on both sides — and that sum is enough for whichever layout you want to build.

The off-centre arrangement you will write a headline on is a crop or a layout decision, and it stays with you. The easiest route is on the CSS side: putting the same file into a full-width box and shifting the focal point right or left moves the person to one side without touching the file at all. The second route is to crop the file itself, and a width of 1800 pixels leaves generous room for that: even after taking a 1200-pixel slice you still have enough resolution for a full-width strip. Both routes are only possible with a file that was wide to begin with.

The background being a single light grey tone is a functional decision in this section rather than an aesthetic one: on a surface that will carry text, contrast has to be predictable. A dark headline hardens on a white ground, and a pale shirt loses its shoulder line there; light grey keeps the silhouette standing while still leaving room for a headline. Clothing and colour detail is in the clothing and colour guide, and the steps for compressing a file for the web and bringing its kilobytes down are in the file size guide.

Does the Photo Have to Be Shot Horizontally?

In practice yes — but what imposes it is geometry, not an institution. If you upload a vertically shot frame to a product that delivers horizontally, a "frame orientation" row appears and suggests turning the phone sideways and reshooting. That is a warning rather than a rejection: if the source is wide enough (a wide lens or a shot taken from a distance), an acceptable horizontal crop can still come out of a vertical frame, and the composition check keeps evaluating it on its own band. The row exists only to send you towards the right correction.

The reason is that the crop does not pad the sides. When the width is insufficient the system preserves the ratio and shortens the height instead; going from a vertically held phone frame to a 3:2 target drops the crop height noticeably and inflates the head ratio. The result is that you are told to "shoot from a little further away" — while the correct fix is to turn the phone sideways. Because advice pointing the wrong way sends people into a second failed attempt, this row was written separately and it only runs on a horizontal target.

The work on the capture side is short: turn the phone sideways, step one or two paces back from the person, keep the face towards the window and leave no movement behind you. The colour and pattern of the wall are irrelevant; the person is separated from the backdrop and the ground moves to a single tone. The step-by-step recipe for light, distance and height is in the corporate portrait shooting guide, and if you want a result wearing a suit or a blazer, the route where the face of the source frame is preserved while the clothing is rebuilt is explained on the AI corporate portrait page.

What Does This Frame Cover, and What Does It Not?

What it covers is every horizontal box: the top band of a company website, the hero band of a founder or executive introduction page, the wide portrait on an "about us" page, a presentation cover and a speaker slide, the portrait in a press-kit file, a blog author band and the introduction box in an event programme. They share exactly one property: an area that runs wide, with room for text beside the person. If your whole team wants a matching set the route is identical, only the instruction becomes shared and the grid frame stays square — details in the team photos guide.

There are two places it does not cover, and both are worth saying up front. The first is the cover or banner slot on platforms: on surfaces such as LinkedIn that box is 1584 × 396 pixels, roughly 4:1 — a 3:2 file does not fill that strip, and cutting one to fit leaves almost nothing of the person. This product covers a presentation cover, not a platform banner. The second is official applications: a wide corporate frame is produced on a light grey background, with an open crop and a smile, and all three are separate rejection reasons on the document side. Document rules live on the biometric photo page of the Turkish civil registry, and the numeric bands for facial proportions in the ICAO portrait quality technical report; both fall outside this product, and those two sources are precisely what draws the line.

The ordering flow needs one frame and takes about half a minute. Pick the wide corporate portrait product in the wizard, upload the frame you shot horizontally and read the free analysis report; the report shows sharpness, light balance, gaze direction, framing and frame orientation in separate rows. Two jobs then run automatically: the background moves to a single light grey tone and the crop is set to a 3:2 ratio. The digital file downloads as a 1800 × 1200 pixel JPEG; if you need a printed copy, the same frame arrives at 60 × 40 mm on a 10 × 15 sheet with cut marks. Current prices appear live in the table further down the page.