What Photos Should a Guy Use on Tinder?

Use five or six, in this order: a clear shot of your face, a full-length shot, one of you at something you really do, one with friends, and one she will want to ask about. Each photo on a Tinder profile should answer a different question about you. A photo that repeats an answer, or raises a question you never meant to raise, comes out.

Your first photo is the one a stranger sees before she decides whether to look any further, so it has one job: show her what you look like. Your face takes up a big share of the shot. You are the only person in it. No sunglasses, no hat pulled low, no filter that smooths you into a slightly different man.

Natural light does most of the work. Stand outside in open shade, or face a window indoors. Overhead light at night digs shadows under your eyes and adds years.

Shoot a lot more frames than feels reasonable. a dating coach went through a student's profile where the setting and the clothes were good and the first photo still failed, because the man was caught mid-smile and looked a little strange. His fix was to take a hundred of the same shot and keep the one where the expression looks easy.

She is already wondering about your build and your height, so answer early. Stand straight, in clothes that fit, with a friend holding the phone at about chest height.

The angle matters more than most men expect. In another student profile a dating coach picked apart, an odd, low angle made the man look dramatically shorter than he is. Nothing was wrong with the man. The photo misreported him, and a woman who meets the real one later feels she was sold something different.

Pick an activity you could talk about for ten minutes: cooking for people, a long hike, a Saturday on a bike, a band practice in a friend's garage. Keep your hands busy and your face visible.

This is the photo a first date gets built from. She will ask about it, and your answer shows whether the photo told her the truth.

A photo with other people says you have a life beyond your phone. Stand where she can pick you out in a second. If she has to hunt for you, move the photo to the back of the set or cut it.

Then add one photo built to start a conversation. a dating coach calls it a curiosity photo: something unusual enough that a stranger wonders what the story is. His own shows him sitting before a bed buried in foreign banknotes, the only photo he captions, and it gets more comments than anything else he has posted. He says it does three jobs. Women write to him instead of only liking. She gets an easy first line. And his replies get easier, because the same two or three questions keep arriving, so he prepares a good answer once.

Do not copy his photo. A thousand men would, and yours has to come from your own life with a true story behind it. A picture of you skiing is a nice picture, not a curiosity photo. His test is blunt: if real women are not asking about it, swap it out.

There is a difference between soft displays of value and hard ones. A good watch on your wrist in a candid restaurant shot says you are comfortable. A close-up of the watch, a flexed shirtless mirror shot or a rented sports car says you need her to know.

A candid frame from a friend's phone also usually outperforms a staged one. Women read a staged photo as effort, and effort reads as insecurity.

• Anything older than a couple of years. She is meeting today's you.
• Mirror and bathroom selfies.
• Near-duplicates from one afternoon.
• A woman standing close to you who could be a partner. Either it confuses her or it starts a conversation you do not want.
• Heavy filters, and any group shot where you vanish into a crowd dressed alike.

Fix the photos first. Words barely count until the photos get some attention, because women do not read the text under a photo that has already lost them.

Then keep the writing short and specific. Having no bio looks lazy, while a long one looks like effort, so a line or two is right. If you add prompt answers, one concrete detail beats three adjectives every time.

Change one photo at a time, give it about a week, and write down what happened. a dating coach's rule for all of online dating is to put something in, see whether it works, and swap it if it does not. A good set usually takes a few rounds, not one.