Profile edits failing: cover photo, education and other sections

What to do when a profile edit will not save, including cover photo size limits and formats, and the steps to work through when a section returns an error.

Editing your profile is free on every account. The cover photo, avatar, bio, education, experience, skills, languages and links are open to any signed in member with no membership required, so a failed edit is never a question of your plan.

Uploading a cover photo or a profile picture

  1. Open Profile from the user menu at the top right. You land on the About page of your own editor.
  2. On the card at the top, use Upload Cover Image for the wide banner, or the camera control on the round picture for your profile photo.
  3. Pick the file. It uploads straight away and shows on your public profile.

Limits that apply:

If the upload will not go through

  1. Check the file size first. Over 5 MB is by far the most common cause, and a phone photo passes that easily.
  2. Confirm the file is really an image, not a renamed PDF or a zero byte file.
  3. Make sure you are still signed in. Sessions end when you close the browser unless Remember me was ticked at sign in, and an expired session makes the upload fail rather than send you back to sign in. Reload the page and check your avatar is still in the top right.

If a section of the About page will not save

You will see a short message reading "Failed to save experience", "Failed to save education", "Failed to save skill" and so on, naming whichever card you were in.

  1. Refresh the page and try once more, in case the session expired while the form was open.
  2. Check every required field on the entry is filled, including the start and end dates.
  3. Retype the name you entered with slightly different wording or capitalisation. A small number of degree, field and skill names fail on the server, and rewording gets past it.
  4. If it still fails, it is a platform problem rather than something you can fix by changing your input. Email contact@uni.xyz with your username and the exact entry you were trying to save.

Which names cause this, and what to type instead, is covered in Cannot update education or experience: server error, failed.

If it saved but nobody can see it

Experience, Education, Achievement, Skills, Languages and Links each carry a Make it visible on my profile checkbox. Left unticked, the entry is stored on your account and never shown to anyone. See How to build your profile on UNI.

View the related page on uni.xyz