Dating Profile Photo Tips For The Over 60s

Nobody enjoys this part. Most of us reached sixty without ever having to choose a photograph of ourselves for strangers to judge, and the whole business feels faintly ridiculous. It is worth doing properly anyway, because a profile with no photograph gets very little attention and a profile with the wrong one gets the wrong attention.

The good news is that the bar is not high. You are not competing with anybody. You only need a few pictures that look like you on an ordinary day.

Smile, and mean it

The single most useful thing you can do. Photographs of people smiling are likely to get roughly twice the messages of photographs of people not smiling, and it costs nothing.

The trick is to be caught rather than posed. Get somebody to make you laugh and take the picture a second afterwards, when the laugh is fading but the face has not gone back to normal yet. That is the one. A held smile always looks held.

Think about what is behind you

Two reasons. The first is that a good background makes a photograph better. Outdoors in the late afternoon, the plaza, the park, the balcony, somewhere with light and a bit of green. Anywhere except a dim room with the television on.

The second is safety. Have a proper look at what is visible before you upload anything. Your street sign, your number on the door, your car and its plate, the view from your window that anyone local would recognise. It is easy to give away where you live without meaning to.

And check who else is in the picture. If there are grandchildren in it, crop them out. Other people did not agree to be on a dating site.

Get the framing right

Head and shoulders for the main one, close enough that somebody can see your face properly on a telephone screen. Most people will be looking at you on a phone, not a computer, so a picture where you are a small figure in a large landscape shows them nothing.

Have the camera at eye height or a little above. Held low and pointing up is unkind to everybody. Natural light beats the flash every time, and near a window is enough.

Then add three or four more that show your life. Something outdoors, something with the thing you actually do, whether that is the garden, the workshop, the choir or the bicycle. Somebody reading your profile is looking for something to ask you about, and a photograph gives them one.

Make it obvious which one is you

A common and easily fixed mistake. If every photograph has four people in it, nobody knows who they are looking at, and most will not bother working it out.

Have at least one where you are clearly alone and clearly in focus. Group photographs are fine after that, and they do show that you have a life, but they cannot be the only thing on offer.

Make it recent, and make it you

This is the one people get wrong most often, and always with good intentions. The photograph from ten years ago where you looked marvellous is a trap. If you use it, one of two things happens. Either nobody contacts you because the picture does not match what you wrote, or somebody does and then meets a different person in the café, and the afternoon starts with an apology.

Nothing within the last year or two, and no heavy filters. The people you want to hear from are looking for somebody in their sixties or seventies. That is the whole point of being here. Looking your age is not a problem to be solved.

The professional option

If you have the money and the idea appeals, a photographer will get you a good picture in half an hour. Ask for something natural rather than a formal portrait, because a studio headshot on a dating profile looks like a passport photograph with better lighting.

You do not need one though. A grandchild with a decent telephone, twenty minutes in the plaza on a bright afternoon and thirty or forty shots will produce two or three you are happy with. Ask them to keep taking pictures while you talk rather than counting to three. Those are always the better ones.

A quick check before you upload

Does it look like you on a normal day? Can somebody see your face clearly on a phone? Are you smiling in at least one? Is there anything in the background you would rather a stranger did not know? Is anyone else in the picture who has not been asked?

If that all passes, upload it and stop thinking about it. It is a photograph, not a verdict.

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