four photo slots and none of them can have my face in them

trying to build a profile that is honest and also cannot be handed round my office, and i have run straight into the photo problem.

no face, that part is not negotiable. i work somewhere small and gossipy and i am not doing that to myself.

but then what actually goes in the four slots? i currently have: a cropped shot from the shoulders down, my hands holding a book, a hill, and my cat. reading it back, that is not a person, that is a police composite.

what i want is for the photos to say something true about what being near me is like, without saying my name. i suspect the answer is more specific than fewer selfies and i suspect this board has already solved it.

so: what is in yours, if you are faceless? and does anyone have a view on how much a faceless profile actually costs you in practice? i would like a realistic number rather than reassurance.

Faceless costs you something and it does not cost you everything, and the difference is entirely in whether the photos still show a life. Four cropped torsos tell me nothing except that you own a mirror. Hands doing something, a room that is clearly yours, the view from a walk you actually take, shoes by a door. I can build a person out of those, and building a person is the only job the photo grid has.

the back of the head one is underrated. you get hair, build, posture, clothes, weather, and no face. mine is me looking at something in a gallery and it does more work than the other three combined

be careful with rooms though, i had someone identify a pub from a corner of a photo. anything with a window, a street or a distinctive doorway is a location tag with extra steps

My compromise, offered for what it is worth. Faceless on the profile, and a face on the video call, which happens before any meeting anyway. That way the photos never sit on a public page and the person I am actually going to have coffee with has still seen me properly. It also means the ones who are only there for a face give up early, which I count as a saving.

counterpoint from someone who did faceless for a year and then stopped. my matches roughly tripled the week i put a face up. i understand every reason not to and i am not telling you to. i am saying the cost is real and this thread is making it sound smaller than it was for me

both true and the deciding factor is what you are protecting against. if the risk is a colleague scrolling past, faceless is doing something real for you. if the risk is more specific than that, a face photo you took yourself and used nowhere else is not much worse, because the person you are worried about already knows what you look like