  In this paper, we have creatively employed the shadow radius to study the
thermodynamics of a charged AdS black hole with a nonlinear
electrodynamics(NLED) term. First, the connection between the shadow radius and
event horizon is constructed with the aid of the geodesic analysis. It turns
out that the black hole shadow radius shows a positive correlation as a
function of the event horizon radius. Then in the shadow context, we found that
the black hole temperature and heat capacity can be presented by the shadow
radius. And further analysis shows that the shadow radius can do as well as the
event horizon in revealing black hole phase transition process. In this sense,
we constructed the thermal profile of the charged AdS black hole with inclusion
of the NLED effect. In P < Pc case, it is found that the N-type trend of the
temperature given by the shadow radius is always coincide with that obtained by
using the event horizon. So, we can concluded for the charged AdS black hole
that the phase transition process can be intuitively presented as the thermal
profile in the shadow context. Finally, the effects of NLED have been carefully
analysed through out the paper.
