Snapbu Finds Your Best Profile Pic With Crowdsourced Swipes

Using crowdsourcing techniques and a Tinder-style swipe mechanism, new site Snapbu lets singles discover what their best dating profile pics are.

You first upload your Facebook pictures to Snapbu, and select which demographics you look for on dating sites.

After you’ve done this, you help other Snapbu members to choose their best photos by swiping through their pictures, giving a positive or negative vote, just like browsing profiles on Tinder.

And once enough people have swiped through your pictures to get an idea of which are most popular with the Snapbu community, you get an email with the results.

Richard Tolley, the co-founder of Snapbu explains: “We look at the ratio of swiped right to swiped left, with a threshold for getting enough data, to compare the images to each other.

“So if one photo is liked 90% of the time and one is liked 70% of the time, the one that is liked 90% of the time is ‘best’.

“The idea is to help people decide which photo to use in dating profiles, which to avoid and hopefully help with some of angst you get about trying to decide which you look good in.”

In a blog post on Medium, Tolley plotted a sample of the photo scores of Snapbu users – how many likes in ten each photo can expect – and compared their best and worst photos:

“The trend line illustrates pretty starkly what you’d expect: attractiveness in your worst photo correlates pretty damned well with attractiveness in your best photo.

“It also shows us just how useful correctly selecting your profile photo can be: if you’re unfortunate enough not to be blessed with the most photogenic mug and your worst shots nets you a solid zero, you can expect your best shot to get you 2.83 swipes out of ten. This effect diminishes the nearer you get to a perfect worst photo.”

The service, which uses the tagline “You at your best”, was created as a side project by Tolley and co-founder Alex Jefferies.

However they got excited about the idea after receiving a positive reaction from users of Reddit, and seeing a conversion of ~50% from people visiting the site to signing up.

Currently, the Snapbu team is putting the final touches to the app software, and taking feedback from their web interface which is currently live here.

Once this is ready, they will launch Snapbu for iOS and Android.