What Is *Your* Best Profile Picture

May 6th, 2010 by Christian

One of our most popular posts ever was about profile pictures and what works and what doesn’t. For example, we examined why two very similar-seeming pictures of two very similar-seeming people often get very different amounts of attention:

As a follow-up, we’ve made something that can generate a personalized analysis of anyone’s profile pictures, something that can make a “blog post” just for you. It’s designed to help you choose your best pictures to put on your OkCupid profile, Facebook page, or whatever—sort of a more scientific (and more useful) Hot-Or-Not. We’re calling it MyBestFace.

It Will Analyze Your Pictures

MyBestFace is very simple: you upload photos of yourself; you contribute a few votes to the system; and after enough other people have done likewise, you get a report about your photos. The report is detailed and very awesome. I’ll show you mine.

It starts, naturally, by telling me which of my pictures was the most popular:

It also tells me what kind of people liked my photos: overachievers, deviants, jocks, whatever:

And I get a nifty map showing where all the people who voted for me are. It looks like I have heretofore undiscovered fan in the Philippines. Sweet.

My favorite part of the report is the end, where it shows the other photos mine were matched up against and exactly which people chose my picture as the best.

If you’d like to examine a complete example report, one of our beta-testers has generously agreed to let you guys browse hers. You can do so here.

Try It Out

MyBestFace is something we thought would be fun. We’re not thinking it’s gonna be huge or anything, but we hope it might be useful to anyone looking to do for themselves what we do here on the blog: figure stuff out. Upload a couple pics and play around with it. And let us know if anything seems busted! Besides your face! Burn!!!

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71 Responses to “What Is *Your* Best Profile Picture”

  1. 1l2Hawk

    Some of these folks needed a NEITHER button!

    Is anybody else getting the error “Unable to open the internet site MyBestFace…” and crashing out to an “IE cannot display this webpage” screen in about 8 out of 10 attempts to click on anything?

  2. joe

    You need a 3rd option called “PASS”. Without it you are unrealistically inflating the status of an image. I also think a PASS option would do well to help people know what pictures they should IMMEDIATELY REMOVE. This site is plagued by high angle shots and duck-face; and a pass option would supply a much needed panacea.

    Otherwise this is pretty amazing. Excellent work!

  3. It’s great and all,but why do I have to just pick men?? I like girls. I think you need to put up a preferancence box,cause I dont want to pick a guy.

  4. chumeia

    So far the results briefly gave me a few new hits but only as a result of my activity on the “My Best Face” application. Posting the picture that other voted for has not altered my real world hits in any way visible.

    I posted two photo groups. The first was strictly a bunch of Random shots. Not yet knowing how the voting worked. I also included a control shot that should have always been voted down, but was also a test to see what people genuinely thought of me. I thought the system simply ranked the photos. I didn’t know they were randomly matched with others 2 at a time. Anyway this first group, contained a photo of a Toad. I really expected all negative and even to have the whole lot thrown out. But no the results came in, and infact the photo had received mostly negatives but I could hardly believe that of the sample data I was shown, some one HAD voted yes for the Toad. My associate explained it as a Toad Prince complex. I laughed so hard I actually cried. So you have to think to yourself when presented with a photo of a Toad and Man, why would you vote for the Toad? LMAO

    The second batch I posted were the best shots I could come up with. These had been my profile shots over the years and some had been highly ranked on “Hot or Not.” When the results came back it was obvious that the results were in line with what OKC had been saying. Strict face shots were not getting attention. People favor a shot with more of you and Other stuff in the shot. But that being said its also been proven that shots of you holding a beer don’t get as much attention, so don’t go wondering why you in a bar with friends doesn’t make the money. I will not vote for any one holding a beer or a cigarette. Additionally when asking of I like a person, if they are listed as highly religious, or being a member of the NRA, I will also not vote for them.

    Now then some are reporting the system not working. I went in and tried to view the default results for the blog. The browser gave me a script warning that a script was causing the page to run slow. I let it continue. The page lagged so bad that I could not scroll. When I finally got to the bottom I discovered that the MAP results seemed to be the reason for the script error. So that means the nifty little map, is causing some trouble. If you get a script error just tell the browser to stop the script. That should help.

  5. One Five Two

    I have one suggestion: Give us 9 photos to choose from and let us multi-select the most appealing photos. This will more realistically conform to real-world selection behavior. Forcing us to choose from 2 photos doesn’t feel right, because I often wish for a “neither” button.

  6. ironsmith

    I agree with 1l2Hawk that some comparisons need a ‘neither’ button, but some also need a ‘both’ button. Many of the pictures were VERY difficult to choose between!

  7. J

    I’d like to have a “both” or a “neither” button. Sometimes, there’s two with incredibly attractive pictures and sometimes it’s the exact opposite.

    Plus, a “use my OKC profile pics” option would be great. Other than that, awesome new feature.

  8. Double date

    OMG which part of “MYbestface” don’t these women understand??

    http://imgur.com/YaVl4.png

  9. kelly

    It might be good to take into consideration the caption that goes with a photo. often it adds important context or just more information that makes the photo more meaningful. maybe another study though.. thanks for the new toy!

  10. Kyle

    This is awesome. Features like this are why I love OkCupid.

  11. Interesting tool – great fun, too! Have run it twice now with different photos.

    It would be nice to have an option to select the age range of the reviewers.
    At 57, I’m more interested in what women my own age group think, rather than the population as a whole.

    As a category, “Women 31+” is waaay too broad and represents only a handfull of reviewers. I’d rather wait a few days to get a representative sample of my age cohort.

    Here’s something I noticed that with my own and competing photos:
    Mid-range shots with some action or attractive backgrounds were often selected over simple head shots. At full-size, mid-range photos may be more interesting, but would not work as a main profile photo in thumbnail size.

  12. TxTruthOrDare

    Love this! Thanks for putting this together.

    I would love it if there was something similar for profile text, which would let you pick the best of two “My Self Summary” write-ups, without pictures.

    Keep up the great work!

  13. wilderbuff

    Some thoughts.. I really wanted a “neither/pass” button for about 10 pairs.

    My dating preference skews heavily based on body weight, which was almost always why I wanted a “pass” button.

    I hate seeing profiles without any clear body shot (all “myspace angles”), but I found myself voting for face-only shots *in preference to* full body shots that weren’t appealing, even when I had a good indication that both women had comparable body size. I wouldn’t actually date either, but because I’m forced to choose I come down on the side of optimism, *even though* I almost never go on dates with women that are lacking a clear body shot in their profile.

    I also found myself noticing trends in the photos I liked and didn’t like (voted for every girl in a green outdoors environment; voted against all women in bridesmaid dresses) and I wished there was a way I could provide instant feedback about the reasoning behind my vote preferences.

    Overall, I felt myself being mostly superficial in my date choices… some women had interesting pictures but were significantly less appealing than their counterparts. I suppose normalization can correct this, but I think that allowing some additional level of description about photos would make the process more relevant, and maybe help us remember that we’re sorting pictures for good dates, not just good lays.

  14. Keepiru_co

    I do agree there should be a neither button, but I don’t think there should be a both button, it is about selection after all. The times where you could pick either, but have to select one will tell you the most about the quality of your picture.

  15. grneyes42

    Enjoyed taking part in My Best Face~~but I was put up against very young women and considering I’m 67 it was rough getting the results that were explained in your survey.
    Just a suggestion~~in the future would it be possible in some way get age groups grouped closer. The voters ages don’t have to change~~ that would get some interesting votes from all of us comparing people in their own generations.
    Thanks for reading this. I really enjoy ok cupid~~it’s the best of all of the dating sites.
    grneyes42

  16. crispy_crab

    Photos with groups of people: WHO ARE YOU?
    Also, maybe pitting people against folks of the same age would be more fair.
    People who just post pictures of their torsos or other bits under the ‘best face’: you guys are twats.

    Maybe if we see all of their pictures and rate them against each other as well that could work.

  17. jakerake

    There should be a way to go back and change what you’re tagged as. I chose a couple, but then later noticed one other one that I fall under pretty well. Can’t find a way to add that tag to my profile.

  18. pen>sword

    Love this feature. The sample is still somewhat small and would like to suggest that the more charity votes someone makes, the more votes that person should get in his or her own report.

    What would also be great is to have some way of customizing the querry. The normalization is great but since everything is being bloated up from smaller numbers it doesn’t seem to reflect where the actual votes went. Unless you’re results show above 65% acceptance over the board, you’ll only have maybe one or two pictures that will say “Love this photo” on average which can be misleading. The said photo may only be marginally better than the next best photo and the normalization will show that they are worlds apart.

    At this stage, perhaps a dot plot may be better suited?

  19. tdogg

    There is no neither button because it would ruin the experiment. You have to pick one of the two because it figures out which picture is best based on statistics of which you pick.

  20. I think this experiment will yield extremely interesting yet obvious info. For example it has made my biases extremely obvious. Age, race, and overall attractiveness (particularly weight) are coming into play when rating. I try to rate the “best” picture. I take composition into account, creativity, clarity, etc. but yet again even a great picture of a extremely unattractive person is well…..unappealing.

  21. Mark

    What is the test re-test reliability of My Best Face?