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If a picture is worth a thousand words, your online dating photos are your opportunity to tell the most about you. Why then does someone sit in their car and take a picture? Or in the office? Or in the bathroom mirror? Or at dinner?
These things have told a viewer that you drive, work, use the potty room and eat. Holy cow, what an adventurous life.
Since you can post multiple pictures, I like to use the photo section with three objectives: 1. Establish attraction 2. Tell things about you that you don’t need to explicitly say in your written profile. 3. Conversational fodder.
1. Establishing attraction.
If you want to be a fair online dater, you need to have at least one facial close-up and one body shot. Do not obscure your facial shots with hats, sunglasses, helmets and Lucha Libre masks. Seems obvious, but it’s not.
Do use the most flattering and recent pictures you have. The unfair online dater tries to be tricky and manipulative in their photos. Some of these shots are very effective, but ultimately, a date is going to want to meet you in person when angling and strategically lighting your body and face probably isn’t reasonable.
“You can use pictures that
will help create conversations.”
2. Illustrate traits and interests.
It’s so much more fun to show pictures than list adjectives. If you show a picture of you building Legos with your nephew, it shows you like kids/family.
If you volunteer with your church, show a picture of you building houses in Mexico. If you want to make it clear you’re outdoorsy, show a picture from your fishing trip in Montana.
If you have a picture of you with a rifle pointed in the distance, that clearly says do not mess with you. I’m just kidding, but you get the idea.
3. Conversational fodder.
My favorite part is when you can use pictures that will help create conversations. Do you happen to have a picture of something really cool or different that happened to you? Do you have any photos that you can tell a story behind?
For example, a picture of you at a concert with a caption like, “Ask me how I got front row at Morrissey” makes a super easy prompt for a date to contact you.
Or maybe you traveled to some exotic land and ate some really bizarre stuff. “Twenty bucks to whoever can guess what I’m eating in this pic,” makes for a great teaser caption.
Be prepared to get repeated responses to bait like that, but that’s a good thing. It shows your picture is working for you. The easier you make it for someone to message you, the more messages you’ll get, and ultimately more dates.
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