I made a thing: a mute button for LinkedIn's pictures

Most photos on LinkedIn are utterly useless. They don't carry any valuable information whatsoever. And then there's that trend of AI generated memes, AI generated comics and AI generated caricatures that I just couldn't stand anymore.

So I made a thing. LinkedIn Media Toggle is a small browser extension that hides the images and videos in feed posts. Images and videos each get their own switch, because sometimes I do want to see the photos and just not the videos (or the other way round). Click the button in the toolbar to get the two switches, or use the shortcuts: Alt+Shift+P for images, Alt+Shift+V for videos. A little badge on the button tells you what's currently hidden.

It only touches what belongs to a post. Photos, carousels, link previews and videos disappear and the post shrinks down to its text, without leaving empty boxes behind. Profile pictures, logos, emoji and reaction icons stay where they are, so you still see who is talking. Hidden videos also get paused, so nothing keeps playing somewhere you can't see it.

Turns out that when you switch off all the flashy decoration, LinkedIn is thrown back to what it really is: a boring place with very little unique content. Without the attention grabbers to scroll past I notice the few real updates from people I care about in seconds. It also feels good to not give any space to all those "watch me watch me watch me" attempts at influencer marketing.

LinkedIn doesn't make this easy

LinkedIn's page uses class names that look like ajrlto ajrikq and they're generated anew with every release, so anything that relies on them breaks sooner or later. The extension ignores them and goes by things that have stayed put: the feed has a fixed marker, videos sit in a standard video player, and every image address on LinkedIn says what kind of image it is. A profile picture's URL literally contains profile-displayphoto while a post photo's contains feedshare, so the extension can tell them apart without caring what the page looks like.

It will still break one day when LinkedIn changes one of those.

Getting it

The code is on GitHub: linkedin-media-toggle, MIT licensed. It's not in any extension store, so you install it by hand. Download or clone the repository, open chrome://extensions (brave://extensions or edge://extensions if that's your browser), switch on Developer mode, click "Load unpacked" and pick the folder. Firefox loads it as a temporary add-on that's gone again after a restart.