• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 30, 2013

Continuing its makeover from a utilitarian professional network into a more media-centric service, LinkedIn has added the ability for users to upload photos, documents and presentations to their status updates.

The company said the new capability, which allows users to upload images and other material through the share box on the home page, would roll out to all members over the next few weeks. Users can also attach a video or other rich media hosted on another site by pasting the URL into the share box. The site’s 2.9 million Company Page owners now also have the ability to directly upload images and files.

Itamar Orgad, senior product manager at LinkedIn, in a blog post today noted that the service could add "a richer and more visual component to your professional discussions," whether it's a presentation about Big Data or an infographic charting top industry trends.

The move follows LinkedIn’s step earlier this month to allow members to add photos, videos and presentations to their profiles. It also ties into the company’s wider efforts to become the Web’s leading professional publishing platform, providing high-level content in visually appealing formats. Most recently, it unveiled a redesign of LinkedIn Today, its digital newspaper, including a new content discovery feature called Channels.

The addition of photo-sharing in updates also brings LinkedIn more in line with mainstream social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where the activity has become a central focus for users. Mary Meeker’s latest presentation on the state of the Internet shows the number of photos uploaded and shared on top social sites so far this year has soared past 500 million, more than twice the total in all of 2011.