How Many Pictures Should You Have on a Dating Profile?

Use as many as you have good ones. For most men that is around five or six. Fewer than four leaves her guessing about your life, and past six each extra photo is usually weaker than the ones before it. A set of five strong photos beats a full set with two filler shots, because she will remember the weakest one.

Every photo has one job. One shows your face clearly. One shows your body. One shows you doing something you actually do. One shows a place you have been. One shows you with other people. Those five jobs answer the questions she is asking in the first seconds: what you look like, what your life is like, and whether other people like you.

So the count is simple. Start with the jobs. If you have one good photo for each, you have five. If you have a second strong one for the same job, such as another place or another activity, you can have six.

The test for any photo is whether it tells her something the others do not. If it only repeats another photo, it does not earn a slot.

Men often keep the maximum number because they cannot decide what to cut. That is a mistake, and the reason is how people look at a set.

She does not average your photos. She notices the one that is blurry, the one that is cropped from a group, or the one that is a gym mirror. The set is judged by its worst moment. A fifth photo that is merely okay makes the other four look less sure.

There is also a quieter cost. Every extra photo is one more place where a stranger can find a reason to say no. Keep the ones that give her reasons to say yes.

The opposite error is posting one or two photos and hoping the face does the work. It rarely does. Two photos leave out the answers she wants: what your life looks like, whether other people like you, and what you do on a weekend.

A thin set also looks like a man with nothing to show. Four photos of four different parts of your life reads as a man with a life.

a dating coach has a favorite photo type he calls a curiosity photo. It is not his best-looking photo and not his most impressive. It is the one that makes a woman ask what is going on. His example is a photo of himself sitting in front of a bed covered in foreign currencies, captioned "Caught in the act."

The point is that it gives her something easy to say. Other photos make her interested, but she may have nothing to write back. A curiosity photo hands her a question. a dating coach says it moves his conversations forward faster, and it makes his replies predictable because the same two or three comments come up again and again.

You can use this for your sixth photo or swap it in for a weaker one. Pick something real that has a story: a strange place you have been, an odd object, a moment mid-adventure.

What makes a good dating profile picture is mostly simple. You are in focus, the light is good, and you look like yourself on a good day.

• Shoot in daylight. Outside, in open shade or near a window, is kinder than any indoor bulb.
• Use different days and outfits. Five photos in one gray shirt looks like one afternoon.
• Have a friend take them. A friend with a phone and an hour is enough. A photo taken at arm's length looks like an arm's length photo.
• Look at the lens in at least one. She should see your eyes without a hat or sunglasses in the way.
• Skip the filters. A heavy filter makes the first date a surprise.

If you do not have a friend to help and your camera roll is thin, take one hour on a weekend, change shirts and locations, and shoot a full set yourself with a phone propped on a shelf or a bench.

Put your clearest face photo first. It is the one that decides whether she looks at the second. Put the activity or the curiosity photo second or third, where she is already interested and wants to know more. Leave the group photo for the middle, since a group photo near the front makes her search for which one is you.

Last, trim. Look at your set as a stranger would and delete the photo you like least. If the set gets better, delete the next one, and stop when the set is down to the photos that each do a job.