LinkedIn has patched the HDR logo glow. Here is what changed.

superwhite.app · status update · 21 September 2026 · by Nimrod Yarkoni

What we observed

Around the third week of September 2026, images that had been glowing in the LinkedIn feed for months stopped glowing. That included company logos set long ago, feed post images, and fresh uploads of files that had passed through the pipeline intact the week before. Downloading the served copies from LinkedIn's CDN and inspecting the JPEG segments shows the difference: the APP2 ICC_PROFILE segment that previously came back untouched is now absent. The pixels are still the PQ-encoded values Superwhite wrote, but without the profile telling the browser to interpret them as PQ, every renderer falls back to sRGB and the image displays as a slightly dim, ordinary picture.

Three things about this are worth stating plainly, because they change the advice we have been giving:

• It is not a new-uploads-only change. Existing logos and posts were affected too. That points to LinkedIn either reprocessing stored assets or changing the serving path so that all renditions are regenerated without the profile. Either way, re-uploading does not help.
• It is not tone-mapping. When Slack clamped glowing workspace logos it kept the profile and tone-mapped the brightness down. What we see on LinkedIn is the profile being removed outright, which is the same treatment gain-map JPEGs and HDR PNGs always received there.
• There is no alternative HDR route on LinkedIn today. We had already tested gain maps, HDR PNG with a cICP chunk, and five HDR video encodings. All were flattened before this change. The ICC route was the only one that ever worked, and it no longer does.

LinkedIn has not published anything about this, so "patched" is our word for an observed pipeline change. It may be a deliberate response to the glow trend, which by August had spread from a handful of security and developer-tools brands to sales tech, ad tech and a wave of free generators. It may equally be a side effect of an unrelated image pipeline update. We cannot tell from the outside, and we will not speculate beyond what the bytes show.

How to verify it yourself

1. Open any post or company page whose logo used to glow, on an HDR screen with battery saver off. If it is a plain logo now, that is the change.
2. Right-click the image, copy the image address (it will be on media.licdn.com), and download the file.
3. Check for a color profile. On a Mac, exiftool file.jpg | grep -i profile or open it in ColorSync Utility. On any system, search the bytes for the ASCII string ICC_PROFILE. Superwhite exports contain it. LinkedIn's served copies no longer do.
4. Open the original Superwhite export on the same screen, or run our free HDR display test to confirm the display itself renders HDR. If the original glows and the downloaded LinkedIn copy does not, the profile was stripped in transit.

Where the glow still works

The technique itself has not changed. A JPEG whose pixels are PQ-encoded and whose embedded profile says so renders above screen white in every color-managed renderer we know of: Safari and Chrome on macOS and iOS, Finder, Preview, Photos, and Chrome on recent Android and Windows HDR setups. What changed is one platform's willingness to pass that file through. So the question for any surface is simply: does your original file reach the viewer, or does something re-encode it on the way?

What this means if you bought Superwhite for LinkedIn

If you bought a Simple or Creator key primarily for LinkedIn in the last few weeks and the change means you got no use from it, email hello@superwhite.app from the address on your order and I will sort it out. New Pro subscriptions are paused as of today. Existing Pro subscribers can cancel any time from Gumroad, and I would rather you did that than pay for something you cannot use; your key keeps working for as long as the membership is active.

Superwhite itself keeps working exactly as before. The exports are correct PQ-encoded JPEGs with a Rec.2100 PQ profile, and on any surface in the "works" rows above they glow the same way they did in the feed. What has changed is our positioning: the homepage, the landing pages and the how-to posts now describe LinkedIn as a surface that was patched rather than one that works, and point to the surfaces you control instead. Every page that previously said the effect "survives LinkedIn" now carries a dated notice linking here.

What happens next

• Monitoring. We re-test LinkedIn's pipeline on a schedule with reference files. If a route reopens, this page and the tool's export screen will say so the same day.
• Other platforms. X, Threads and Bluesky get the same battery of tests we ran on LinkedIn (organic uploads, served-copy byte inspection, HDR and SDR viewers). Results will be added to the table above.
• The web route. The most durable home for the glow was always the surface nobody re-encodes: your own site. Expect the tool to lean into that, with export presets for hero images and an embed snippet that avoids the common CDN pitfalls.

The honest note we always attached

Every explainer on this site has ended with the same caveat: the glow was attention arbitrage on borrowed time, platforms clamp whatever gets abused, and nobody should build a brand system on it. That window has now closed on the platform where the trend started. It stayed open for roughly a year, which is longer than most of these tricks get, and it produced a small category of tools, several teardowns, and a lot of "is my screen broken?" comments. The technique is still real and still renders brighter than white wherever your file arrives intact. It just no longer does so in the LinkedIn feed.