To find out what makes a good profile picture on OkCupid we collected 552,000 example user pictures, paired them up and asked people to make snap judgments, like so:

We collated these millions of judgments with the time of day each picture was taken, what the shutter speed was, and so on. Almost all modern cameras embed this stuff in a special header, called EXIF data.

We also made graphs (you’re welcome).

Here are our findings:

1. Panasonic > Canon > Nikon.

Prefer a professional camera over your phone? Well, the type and brand of camera you use has a huge effect on how good you look in your pictures. This is a plot of the most popular makes:

As you can see, the general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures. Not sure what’s going on with Kodak all the way to the right there. They might want to consider making sharing more difficult.

Beyond the advantages or shortcomings of any specific brand, the more-complex-is-better trend bears out at all ages:

And we also found similar numbers looking only at people who uploaded all three types of photos. Putting such a triplet together dramatically illustrates the difference in quality: