How Many Photos Can You Upload to eHarmony?

Up to 12. eHarmony lets you use up to 12 photos, and every member has to have at least one uploaded and approved. For your main photo it recommends a close-up head shot without a hat or sunglasses, plus at least one full body shot, and it advises against group photos and mirror, bathroom or gym selfies.

Twelve is the ceiling, and one approved photo is the floor. Everything in between is your choice.

That one required photo is not a formality. Every photo on eHarmony is reviewed. Even so, a man who gets one weak shot approved and forgets about it shows every woman who finds him that one weak shot and nothing else. The minimum keeps you on the site. It does not make anyone want to write to you.

If you only have one or two photos you like, that is a reason to take more, not a reason to fill the gaps with weaker ones.

eHarmony's own advice is specific. Your main photo should be a close-up head shot, with no hat and no sunglasses. And somewhere in the set there should be at least one full body shot.

Both requests make sense from her side of the screen. The head shot answers her first question, which is what your face looks like. A hat or sunglasses hides the parts of your face she is trying to read, especially your eyes. The full body shot answers her second question, which is what the rest of you looks like. A set with nothing but close-ups makes her wonder why.

The full body shot does not need to look posed. You standing at a lookout on a hike, or walking along a street in decent clothes, shows your build naturally without making a point of it.

eHarmony advises against two kinds of photo. The first is the group photo. a dating coach's objection to group shots is simple: she cannot tell which one is you, so the photo spends her attention on strangers.

The second is the selfie taken in a mirror, a bathroom or a gym. These look low effort, and the background does you no favors. A towel rail and a toothbrush holder are not the details you want a woman to remember. A gym mirror shot tends to read as a man who wants to be judged on his body before anything else.

If training is a real part of your life, show it another way. A photo from a race you ran, or of you on a bike halfway up a hill, says the same thing without the mirror.

Twelve is a limit, not a target. Most men do better with a smaller set of strong photos than a full set with weak ones mixed in.

My rule is to cut any photo that is clearly worse than the others. One poor shot does not get averaged out by the good ones around it. It drags them down, because it is the photo she ends up wondering about.

Five or six good photos, each showing something different, usually do more than twelve that repeat each other. Vary the places, the clothes and the time of day. Each photo should add a fact about your life that the others have not already covered.

Lead with the head shot eHarmony recommends. Put the full body shot near the front, second or third. After that, use photos that show what you actually do: cooking at home, a trail you walk on weekends, a street in the city you live in.

Keep your strongest photos in the first few slots, and keep anything borderline out entirely. If you find yourself arguing with yourself about whether a photo is good enough, it is not.

Then look at the order on your phone the way she will see it, one photo at a time. If the first three alone would make you curious about the man in them, the set is doing its job.

Your photos make claims about your life. Your written answers either back those claims up or quietly contradict them. If your photos show a man who travels and your answers never mention a trip, the set starts to feel borrowed.

So look at the whole page together. Each photo should connect to something you wrote, and each strong answer should have a photo that supports it. That is what makes one man's page feel real and another's feel like a form he filled in.