Should Dating Profile Photos Be Vertical or Horizontal?

Vertical, almost every time. A dating app is read on a phone held upright, so a tall photo fills the screen and keeps your face large, while a wide one has to be cropped or shrunk to fit. A horizontal photo works only when you have framed the crop yourself so that you are still easy to find. Take new photos tall, and fix old wide ones before you upload them.

Think about how she looks at a dating app. She holds the phone upright, with one thumb, and moves through photos in a second or two each. Whatever fits that tall frame is what she sees.

A vertical photo of you fills it. Your face is big, your build is clear and there is no wasted space. A wide photo of the same afternoon has you small in the middle of a lot of scenery. She can see the beach, and she cannot see whether she likes the man standing on it.

Your face is the reason the photo exists. Give it room.

Every app has to fit a wide photo into a tall space, so it crops it, shrinks it with empty bars around it, or lets you choose the crop. How each app does this can change when it updates, and we cannot tell you the exact rule for every version.

What we can tell you is the risk. If the app picks the crop, it picks the middle. A man standing off to one side of a wide photo can lose half his face. a dating coach looked at one man's set in a profile review and pointed at a photo that was off-center and cropped so the head was not fully in the frame. He said it was not as good as it could be, even though the man was a good-looking guy.

Do not leave that choice to the app.

Some photos are wide because the scene is wide: a trip, a group dinner, a view, a game with friends. They show a life, and that is worth showing.

The problem is a wide group photo where she cannot tell which man is you. a dating coach reviewed a photo like that and said it was a cool-looking picture, but that he could not tell who the man was or how the scene connected to him. A photo she cannot decode is a photo she skips.

If the scene is the point, crop it. Make a tall version centered on you, with enough of the surroundings left in to tell the story.

Open the photo in your phone's editor and set a tall crop. Then check a few things.

Put your face in the upper half of the frame, with a little room above your head. Do not cut your head at the forehead, and do not cut your body off at the elbows or knees. Keep the crop on you, not on the person next to you.

Do not zoom in so far that the picture goes soft. If a crop makes the photo blurry, the photo is not usable, and a sharp ordinary one beats it.

a dating coach says he shows men how to crop a photo or draw a boundary around it, and that this turns a poor photo into a good one more often than men expect.

Ask a friend to hold the phone upright and stand back far enough to leave room around you. Take far more shots than you need. a dating coach says to expect to take a hundred or even two hundred and keep two, and that is normal.

Vary the setting and your clothes across the set. Use daylight. Have your face in the top half of the frame in at least some of them, and one full-length shot so she can see how you stand.

After you upload, look at your own page on your phone, held upright, and swipe through the photos one at a time. Ask the question she asks: can I tell who this man is and what he looks like within a second?

If the answer is no for any photo, recrop it or remove it. a dating coach says a woman judges you by your worst photo, so if you have three good photos and one weak one, the weak one is hurting you. When you are in doubt about a photo, leave it out.

Done well, orientation is a small decision with a big effect. A tall frame filled with your face costs you nothing and gets you looked at.