WebProNews

Professional social networking site LinkedIn will start allowing its members to add one professional photograph of themselves to their user profiles beginning tomorrow.

It is somewhat surprising that this featured was not available sooner. LinkedIn says they made the move to allow photos of its users because it was one of the most common requests from its users. The site will allow only one picture that is 80 by 80 pixels.

LinkedIn said it considered the move carefully to add photographs to users profiles. On the LinkedIn blog, Adam Nash, Senior Director of Product writes, "However, before we could add photos to the site, we had to give considerable thought to the best way to integrate photos into a professional site."

" Privacy is an incredibly important issue to us, and we wanted to make sure we had the right controls in place.  As a result, all members will have the option to control whether their photo is visible to their connections, their network, or everyone."

The decision by LinkedIn to allow users to add photos to their profiles was also most likely driven by the need to keep pace with Facebook which is competing to capture LinkedIn's audience.

LinkedIn says over the next few months it plans to integrate profile photos into other features.