How to crowdsource your next profile photo

Your profile photo might be the most important investment you make in sharing your persona with the world. Some people have different photos for different services, some have one photo for everything, and some simply take a smartphone selfie when they need one. Yet lots of research shows that this photo is more important than you think.

Wait, I don’t have time to find the perfect photo

Like you, I don’t change my social photo that often, unless you count the occasional selfie sent to family or friends. Last week, I decided to update my “face” to the world and create a new photo. Lots of things have changed since the last formal photo I had taken, and I wanted to use the power of the crowd to help select my next social photo.

The “perfect photo” in this case might not exist — I needed a way to remove some of my own inherent bias and avoid generalizing from a small amount of data — and I needed an experiment to present some information, get feedback from at least 30–40 people, and then deliver enough information to make a decision.

Feeling like a proper social scientist, I decided to build a simple experiment to answer the question. Take some photos, get some feedback, and make a decision. It’s easy, right?

Building a Process for Photo Feedback

Note that I didn’t build a foolproof process, and neither should you. The point is that you should have some (semi) objective criteria to make it easier for you to use the data you get to make your decision.

Start with a Great Photographer

To take great pictures, you need a great photographer. Thank you, Erin McKeeby, for taking engaging, real pictures, and for making me smile (outtakes not included here).

Erin took pictures in a single session using natural indoor lighting, and shared the originals with me using Google Drive. This first step helped both us to evaluate the portraits and to rule out some of the initial portraits we took.

Here are some ideas for getting a variety of poses and backgrounds:

• Take at least one set of pictures against a blank or low texture wall. This will give you a version of your portrait you can use in almost any situation.
• People want to see you, not the background. It helps to use a “Prime” lens (e.g. A 38mm f 1.8 portrait lens, if you are using a DX-format Nikon camera) and focus so that the depth of field emphasizes your face.
• Wear interesting clothing, but not too interesting. Your mileage may vary here, and your portrait will look best if you wear comfortable clothing that matches the intent of your photo.

Choosing the Right Look

We used a simple rubric to find the right social photo:

1. The photos should look “authentic.” We weren’t sure what that meant, but landed on a description of “looks like you…” which is a bit of a strange description when talking about a portrait.
2. The photos should feel natural, and not forced. Social photos should feel friendly, inviting, and open.
3. The photos should portray confidence and competence. The first glympse a person has of you should incite trust.

Erin sent the photos, and I composited them into a “4-up” style composite by first squaring the pictures in Photos, using Instagram’s Layout App to make them into a composite, and the Over app to place the letters in the corner of the composite.

Share and Test the Picture

As a test to see the levels of engagement, I posted the resulting composite on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

If you wanted to refine this idea further, you might set up a small web app asking people to click the photo they like the best, or use a service like PhotoFeeler to get additional results from people you don’t know.