The hotter you look, the more views you get

You’ve read my article on aspect ratios and know what size of the picture would be ideal for your profile. Now you are probably wondering how to get that one ideal picture taken to grab everyone’s attention.

There are two approaches to getting the pictures for your profile

Just about everyone uses the “OK, let’s have a look what pictures I have” strategy. They then look through all the pictures they have on the computer, find a few that are OK and use those.

Unless you have friends who are good photographers, that approach is sub-optimal at best. Most people can’t take a good picture. Moreover, they are typically taken in bad lighting and with focus on the ambiance rather than on you personally.

Taking pictures specifically for your profile is a much better idea

Overall, what you want is a good headshot. It’s not too difficult to get them done. All you need is a good digital camera, a thermonuclear source and some water vapor.

What?!

Sun and clouds…

There is a perfect article on creating killer headshots written by David Griffin. Read it. He’s an expert. He saved me a lot of time so I don’t have to write something like that from scratch.

While it’s certainly possible to take pictures like this with regular point&shoot cameras, a DSLR helps immensely.

I’ve used that article with great success. In fact, if you are booking a session with me, you won’t see lots of studio lighting gear. I just use my Rebel XT, my portrait lens, my cheap tripod, and whatever happens to look pretty as a background.

Self-portrait approach

A self-portrait should be your last resort. I had an emergency where I needed a headshot for a conference where I was speaking. It’s not my best by a long shot, but it worked for that purpose.

When you are doing portrait photography, you are going for a very shallow depth of field. That means you focus the viewer’s attention on the subject and blur out the background. You’ll notice that all pictures in print media and on the web are done that way. This is how we make the subject literally pop off the page.

Unfortunately, shallow depth of field requires very accurate focus. We normally focus on the subject’s eye. This is very tricky to do with a self-timer and manual focus. Bottom line: don’t try that at home. What normally is a 10-second job becomes a 1-hr ordeal.

Sharp focus is a double-edged sword. When the picture is sharp, it literally jumps off the page. However, all the flaws are also readily visible.

Have someone else take your picture for free

Find a friend with a DSLR and print out that article for him or her. You’ll have good results.

Alternatively, have a photographer take some pictures. There are many photographers who simply love taking pictures. Some of them want to transition into making it their business. In order to make money with photography, we need portfolios that showcase our work. Most commonly, we have an arrangement with the model that is referred to as TFP or TFCD. In such an arrangement, we take pictures of a model and give him or her a CD of the images in exchange for permission to use those images for our portfolios. TFCD stands for “trade time for CD” One place where you’ll find someone like that would be on Craigslist in the Talent Gigs section.

Pay someone to take your pictures

If you approach dating as personal marketing, it may make sense to invest into a professional photoshoot. After all most sites charge a fee to host your profile. Without good pictures, that tends to be a waste of time and money.

If you are local in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can snap a few shots for you. This will not be free.

The ethics of retouching

While it may be very tempting to perform a digital cosmetic surgery, I do not recommend doing that. I can easily create a what is referred to as “soft focus” image, but in the context of dating I am not sure I’d recommend using that. Such an image is what is commonly used in magazines. Compare the picture of the same celebrity in People magazine and in National Enquirer. I am sure you’ll see a big difference in her appearance.

Cleaning up the skin is easy and certainly should be done. Digital cosmetic surgery, on the other hand, will create an idealized image of you that may lead to disappointment in-person.

A hot headshot will get you more clicks. Take the time and do it right. The easiest way to test it is to post it on Hotornot.com and see what rating you will get.

Flash is bad! (Unless you are good)

Taking headshots with a flash typically has pretty bad consequences.  Basically, flash creates shadows that do not flatter the subject. That is precisely why I much prefer taking pictures in day light.

In order to take a good indoor picture with flash, we use diffusers, softboxes, and a whole bunch of other equipment. None of that is necessary with nice and soft day light.

Smile!

Model headshots are typically not smiling. If you have a good smile, show it. It shows friendliness. Some people actually should not be smiling, paradoxically enough.

Social networking and dating websites have significantly different ideal image aspect ratios.

Resizing your pictures to ideal dimensions is easily one of the fastest ways to increase your profile views.

If you pay attention to those ideal picture dimensions ratios, your images will stand out from the crowd and get your profile viewed more. What is most important to you is how your thumbnails show up in the site’s search. After all, nothing prevents you from uploading an unmodified picture into a second picture slot, but we only have one opportunity to catch her eye in the sensory overload of thumbnails.

Image aspect ratio is the proportion of an image’s length to its height.

There is a bonus point for websites that crop your pictures to bring out your face. If you submit a picture that is ideally cropped, you will retain control over how you will be presented to the world. Believe me, that is not trivial. The staffers generally don’t do a good job at making you look your best because their workload is astronomical.

By the end of this article, you will know how to avoid having your pictures be blurry, squished, distorted, and too small.

Here is how to optimize your pictures for several popular websites to achieve professional results

MySpace.com

Have you noticed that on MySpace, for example, certain images on the friends thumbnail page look better? Myspace has optimized its site for long and narrow portraits and full length vertical body shots. In fact, MySpace photos get resized proportionally to be 90 pixels in width. The main profile pictures are 170 pixels in width.

Your best bet for the ideal MySpace profile picture thus becomes a vertical image that would look good when resized down to 170 pixels in width. I would suggest taking a high quality body shot and cropping it to a multiple of 170 pixels. 340 pixels should be sufficient. With MySpace, we have the opportunity to show not just your face but also the rest of you with no penalty. We are not so lucky on most other websites.

What’s interesting about this site is that it resized my properly sized 534×800 2:3 image down to 162×242. It appears that the absolute maximum is 170×400, or a 2:5 ratio. Crop a picture to 4:5 and then crop it in half, if that’s what you want. Out of curiosity, I uploaded a 600×1499 picture that got resized to 170×424 picture and an 80×199 thumbnail.

Rest assured, that picture will stand out of the crowd as you’d be literally twice as tall as everyone else around you

For MySpace.com, the maximum (that I found so far) image size is 170×424 (although 170×255 is what I normally see) and its ideal image aspect ratio is 2:5 even though most will use 2:3.

Facebook.com

On Facebook, your friends are represented as 50×50 pixel thumbnails.

Your photos are probably represented by 130×130 pixel thumbnails.

The maximum profile dimensions appear to be 200×266. You will have a built-in image cropper to select your thumbnail image.

For Facebook, the ideal picture size is 200×266 or its multiple and the ideal image aspect ratio is 3:4

Plentyoffish.com

Let’s look at Plentyoffish. Their ideal image size is different. Unlike Myspace, they merilessly destroy your photograph by squishing it into a 75-pixel square. It is tremendously challenging to stand out from the crowd in the sea of people on plentyoffish. On the other hand, you can use that to your advantage. If your picture shows undistorted, and everyone else is distorted, it will be you who gets his click.

Your best bet for Plentyoffish is to use square pictures. According to their own recommendations, 300×300 pixels square images will work best. Again, resize your profile photograph to match these dimensions, and I will guarantee you a lot more profile views, assuming your face looks good. On that site, you don’t see headlines in quick match view, so having a very clear face picture is essential.

You need to understand that Plentyoffish will resize all of your photos down to about 300 pixels. Don’t upload a picture that looks good at full resolution, but where you are just a tiny dot at a reduced resolution. This is particularly true for beach photos. Crop them to showcase you, and not the gorgeous landscape. You can always review and marvel at the original size photos with him in your bed and under candle lights later. For now, your task is to highlight your text with relevant pictures where you can be clearly seen.

For Plentyoffish, the ideal image size is 300×300 pixels and its ideal image aspect ratio is 1:1

Match.com

Match’s profile thumbnail images are 80 pixels in width. The aspect ratio for the thumbnail is 4:5. Sounds simple, right? Match will even crop your picture for you.

The ideal image size for a Match.com profile image is 280×350 and its ideal image aspect ratio is 4:5

Chemistry.com

Chemistry profile thumbnail images are displayed initially scaled down to 145 pixels in width, however their micro-thumbnails are only 51px. Chemistry does have a dynamic overlay so that if you move your mouse over the tiny thumbnail, you can see the 80px version of that file. Actually, it’s even more complicated, but if you will care about such minute details, you can probably write an article like this yourself.

It appears that the ideal photo size for that site is a maximum of 400 pixels in width. When scaled down to 80 pixels, it would appear 5 times smaller. When scaled down to 51 pixels, it would appear approximately 8 times smaller.

They use a slightly non-standard ratio of 9:10, but the height is only very slightly longer than the width. I think they were going for 4:5, but they are not enforcing that.
For Chemistry.com, the ideal image size is 400×400, and its ideal ratio is 1:1.

Friendfinder.com and its less wholesome siblings

Did you know that the entire company is now owned by Penthouse?

Friendfinder thumbnails are 96×96 pixels. Friendfinder lets you have much larger pictures visible to gold members. If you are more into the adult side of that network, such as adultfriendfinder, passion, outpersonals, millionairemate, or alt, then you should especially realize that your thumbnail picture should be of your face and not of any other body parts. It is true that 96px is enough space to fit a good body shot, but gorgeous headshots tend to get more clicks, unless your body would still score 8+ on Hotornot after about 500 votes.

They only recently changed to square pictures on profile. If you have an older account there, you should update your picture to the correct size.

For friendfinder.com and its siblings, the ideal image size is 300×300 and its ideal image aspect ratio is 1:1 or square.

The unexpected bonus of the megapixel wars

Look at all of your snapshots taken with multi-megapixel cameras. Most of them are probably mediocre. Look at them at 100%. Do you realize that you only need an approximately 300 pixel square image to show your smile? If the overall composition is not so good, but the smile is burning hot, take the smile and ignore the rest of the image.

I went through my entire picture library and found one of my better smiles on a picture where my head is barely visible. That was only a 2.1-megapixel picture! If you routinely take 3+MP pictures, you probably have some very good candidates for creative cropping.

How on Earth can you optimize your images to each of the sites?

Are you getting dizzy yet from all these calculations?

The easiest way I’ve found so far is to use Google’s Picasa. It’s free and can do that pretty easily. What you’ll do is use crop tool and then export the result as a new image. Do yourself a huge favor, and don’t work on originals. Make a copy of your source photos and import that folder into Picasa separately from the rest of your pictures.

Undocumented Picasa tricks

There is an undocumented trick for Picasa to achieve 4:3, square, and 3:2 crop ratios. To get a 4:3 ratio, you would hold down CTRL while in manual crop mode. To get square ratio, hold down the SHIFT key while in manual crop mode. For the 3:2 crop ratio, you would hold down the ALT key while in manual crop mode. An astute reader will also recognize that 3:2 is same as 6:4 and 5:4 is same as 10:8, both of which are preset ratios in the photo size dialog box.

In summary, use the 4:6 option for ratios of sites requiring 2:3. Use the 8:10 option for ratios of sites requiring 4:5. You’ll have to use manual mode to get a square crop or a 3:4 ratio. Picasa will automatically adjust the overall image ratio if you use a modifier key and continue dragging.

Again, as of build 2.7, this is undocumented, so don’t bother looking through Picasa help for these modifier keys.

This article took many hours to research and write. I firmly believe that this research will help you to get more profile views with all the consequences of getting more dates. Who knew that knowing math could help you get a date? I welcome your comments.