Yes, very. Why? What is the difference between what is said (or not) and what the reality may be – the photo helps us decide?

When you enrol for the first time with an online dating agency,  you complete to some degree or other, a personal profile of yourself. You may or may not load a photograph at that time. You then search the profiles of others to seek potential partners. Some profiles you view may have photographs of the other person or sometimes not.

No Photographs on a Profile?
If there’s no picture on a profile when you search, then it could be for several reasons:

• The default search criteria that you are using excludes profiles without photographs. This is easily dealt with by changing those settings in the search panel.
• The person is not technical (though most people today can load a photo or get someone to do it for them).
• The person has just started setting up a basic profile and hasn’t organised a photo yet.
• They have loaded a photograph and it is awaiting approval by the agency (this can in some circumstances take several days).
• The person doesn’t think other people will find them attractive
• The lady is very attractive and wants to restrict her picture to those who are interested in her profile first.  Private photos (e.g. for Favourites Only) help to get around this problem.  This is not usually a problem for men.
• Some people are just nervous or cautious about a visible online presence, and that is quite reasonable. In that case they may well have photographs ready and waiting to send you; alternatively, if the site has the feature, they may have private photographs loaded to be viewed by invitation only.

So,  you can see that there are several valid reasons why photographs may not be present at a given point in time. And, the very person you seek may be one of those!

Importance of Photographs.
Photographs are important, because if someone’s appearance is not attractive to you, then that’s not a good start (and similarly from the other person’s point of view). Of course, when it comes to a photo of yourself, then you will get a much lower response ……….

This is only half the article about photographs….for the full story get my Online Dating Guide!

The Online Dating Guide is unique, containing much distilled experience from years of online dating by Phil and his friends.

(C) 2009 Phil Marks