AI Dating PicsTwenty minutes, 24 photos.
Your model learns from exactly what you hand it. Give it variety in everything — light, clothes, places, angles — and consistency in one thing: your face. None of these has to be a good photo. Ask a friend to shoot the ones you can’t take yourself, and put twenty minutes aside.
The shot listWhat we check, on our endWhat happens when a photo fails
Before you start
Get someone else to hold the phone
A friend, a partner, a parent. It is the only way to get the full-body and candid frames, and someone else behind the camera changes how you stand. Failing that, prop the phone on something and use the self-timer.
Selfies count, at arm’s length
A selfie is a clear close-up of your face, which is exactly what the model wants, and a few of them in the set is normal. What does not work is a front camera held close to your face: that lens stretches the nose and shrinks the ears, and the model learns the distortion as part of you.
Rear camera, portrait mode off
The rear camera is sharper and does not bend your face. Portrait mode’s fake background blur leaves halos around your hair and the model learns the halos too. No zoom past 2×, walk closer instead.
Send the originals
Keep them at 12 MP or more and don’t shrink them. HEIC is fine, we convert it. Don’t route them through WhatsApp, iMessage or Instagram first — they compress hard enough to fail the check. AirDrop, Drive, or straight from your camera roll to the upload page.
The shot list
Work down it in order. The groups are the three framings our check counts, plus a couple of your own, and it deliberately asks for more of each than the check needs — so a rejected photo or two never costs you the set.
Headshots face and shoulders
- Facing a window, looking at the camera, neutral.
- Same window, turned 45° to the left, small smile.
- Same window, turned 45° to the right, neutral.
- Outside in the shade, a real smile.
- Golden hour — the hour before sunset — laughing.
- Indoors at night, one lamp on, neutral.
- Outside at night with the phone flash on, open smile.
- Any light, any angle, whatever expression feels like you.
Waist-up belt line and up
- Outfit A, location 1, standing.
- Outfit A, location 1, looking off-camera.
- Outfit B, location 1, seated.
- Outfit B, location 2, hands doing something — a coffee, a sleeve, a door.
- Outfit C, location 2, walking toward the camera.
- Outfit C, location 2, leaning on something.
- Any outfit, arms crossed or hands in pockets.
- Any outfit, mid-conversation with someone off-frame.
Full body head to shoes
- Standing, facing the camera.
- Standing, three-quarter turn.
- Walking.
- Sitting — a bench, some steps, a chair.
- Wide, on a street or in a park: small in frame, still clearly the subject.
- At night, with flash.
Wildcards whatever framing they come out at
- Something you actually do — cooking, the gym, climbing, a guitar.
- A candid a friend takes when you are not posing.
The rules
These decide whether a set trains well. Not one of them is about how good you look in any single photo.
- Mix your expressions, and count them. At least 2 photos with a relaxed, closed-mouth face, and at least 2 where you are laughing or smiling with your mouth open. A model can only make an expression it has seen: give it nothing but straight faces and every smile it produces borrows somebody else’s teeth. The headshots above cover this if you shoot them as written.
- Use at least three of the five kinds of light: window, outdoor shade, golden hour, one lamp indoors, flash at night.
- Wear at least four different outfits, and shoot in at least four different places. Never use the same outfit in the same place twice.
- Keep your face bare. Nothing on it, nothing over it, nothing in front of it.
- Shoot it as you are now. Everything under about two years old, with the hair and beard you have today — the profile has to match the man who turns up for the first drink, and the live selfie the apps now ask for.
Don’t send
The first four are what our check rejects outright. The last four it cannot see, and they cost you the likeness anyway.
- Group shots, or anyone else in the frame, including someone standing behind you.
- Screenshots, photos of photos, and anything a chat app has already compressed.
- Blurry frames, dark frames, and photos where your face is a small blob in a landscape.
- Sunglasses, hats, hoods, a hand across your face. We catch these when they hide enough of you, which is most of the time.
- Mirror selfies with the phone in shot.
- Filters, beauty mode, skin smoothing, FaceApp, anything already retouched.
- Only your good side. A set shot from one angle teaches the model one angle, and makes every other frame less like you.
- Anything older than about two years, or with hair or a beard you no longer have.
What we check, on our end
Every photo is checked on our server the moment it lands — not in your browser, where it could be argued with — and again when you press Continue. If the service that runs the check can’t answer, nothing is marked ready: we would rather stall than train on a set nobody looked at.
Every photo
- One person
- A second clearly visible face rejects the photo. Someone tiny in the background is ignored; someone standing next to you is not.
- Big enough to read
- Measured on the file you sent. Screenshots, and photos that have been through a chat app, usually fail here.
- Face big enough in frame
- Below that there is not enough face to learn from. The same measurement names the shot: 28%+ is a headshot, 12%–28% is waist-up, 5%–12% is full body.
- In focus
- We measure the face crop, not the whole photo, so a crisp background never rescues a soft face. Slightly soft passes with a note; properly blurry is rejected.
- Lit so we can see you
- Too dark, too bright, or the highlights blown to flat white on your face. Again measured on the face, not the room.
- Not a near-duplicate
- Burst frames, re-sent copies and two shots a second apart count once: we keep the sharpest and reject the rest. A burst from one moment is one photo to us, not a set.
- Clearly you, face uncovered
- Every photo is compared against the middle of your set. Sunglasses, a mask, a hand across your face, or a photo of someone else, all fail here.
- A file we can open
- The upload page rejects anything else before it leaves your phone.
The set as a whole
- Enough photos
- Under 12 accepted and you cannot continue. Over 30 we keep the sharpest 30 and mark the rest “not needed”, which is not a failure.
- Enough of each framing
- Minimums, counted from accepted photos only — which is why the shot list above asks for more than this.
- The same face throughout
- The set is compared against itself. A photo that is not clearly the same person as the rest is rejected rather than averaged in.
- Expressions
- We read the expressions across your set and tell you what is thin — for example, two more photos where you are laughing. Today that is advice: it will not stop you continuing. It is still the cheapest thing you can do to make the happy frames look like you.
Some things only earn a note and the photo still counts: slightly soft focus, a head turned a long way to the side or tilted far up or down, a face very tight in the frame.
What we can’t check: how many outfits, backgrounds and light types you used, how old the photos are, and whether they have been filtered or retouched. Nothing stops you uploading a beauty-filtered photo. It just teaches the model a face that isn’t yours, and the apps now compare a live selfie against your profile, so that is the one shortcut that can cost you the account.
What happens when a photo fails
Each photo comes back labelled
Accepted ones say which framing they counted as. Rejected ones carry the reason in one line — “More than one person”, “Blurry”, “Too dark”, “Duplicate of IMG_4021”, “Face hidden or not you”.
You replace only those
The bars under your photos say which framing is still short, so you know what to go and shoot. Delete the flagged ones, add replacements, and the check re-runs as they arrive.
Continue stays locked until the set passes
And the whole set is checked once more when you press it, so what gets trained is exactly what passed.
None of this costs you anything
You pay after your set passes, never before. A set that never passes is never shot from and never charged for, and if you can’t get one through, we would rather tell you that than take the money.
Ready to shoot?
Start with the quiz — two minutes, and it decides what we shoot for you. Your upload page is on the other side of it, and $49 is due only once your set passes.
Start with your photos