Teachers and academics have profile photos in more places than most people realise. School websites. University department pages. Research Gate. ORCID. TES for jobseekers. Conference programmes. SLT and governor bios. A chapter-author thumbnail on a book the publisher is promoting.
Almost none of them are up to date. Almost all of them were taken on a phone at a staff training day or cropped from a summer-term group photo.
This post is about doing it properly, without losing a day of term to a studio visit.
Worth knowing, because most people underestimate the surface area:
That's seven or eight touchpoints for the average working teacher or lecturer. All quietly using whatever photo is currently on file.
Individually each of those is fine. Collectively, they add up to a professional image that's more patchwork than polish.
Education has its own quiet conventions, slightly different from corporate or legal:
Leadership bios carry more weight than classroom teacher pages. Parents choosing a school, donors choosing an institution, prospective students choosing a university — they all look at the headshot of the person in charge.
For leadership roles, a properly sharp, well-lit photo in smart professional attire is worth the small effort. For classroom teachers, the bar is lower — "looks like me, reasonably tidy, not visibly from six years ago" is fine.
The difference is audience, not personal importance.
The old workflow — book a photographer, take a half-day off, come back with one photo — was never realistic during term. The newer workflow works around a working week:
Ten minutes of your time, spread across a day. No cover needed, no lost PPA, no £300 invoice.
Because education involves working around children, data handling for any image service matters more than in most professions. Profyle is UK-based, ICO registered, and UK GDPR compliant. Original selfies are deleted within 30 days of delivery. Images are never used to train any model.
If your school or university has a strict policy about where staff photos can be processed, this is the sort of provider the DPO will approve. Services based in the US or with unclear data handling will — rightly — fail that check.
For schools or departments looking to refresh every staff photo at once, the per-person model scales well. No studio day to coordinate. No cover to organise. Each member of staff uploads their own selfies during a two-week window, and the Comms or marketing lead receives the final chosen image from each.
For a secondary school with 80 teaching staff, the total cost sits in the low thousands at most — compared to several thousand for a studio day that would likely only cover half the team anyway.
Starting around £29 for a personal session. For context, a local studio sitting runs £150 to £400 and requires a chunk of your day off.
For a working teacher, the maths favours the newer model heavily, especially when you count the hours you didn't lose.
Three practical steps:
By the end of the month your school website, research profile, LinkedIn, and anything else that's currently carrying a 2019 photo will be properly up to date.
A decent headshot is a small, durable improvement to your professional presence that most people in education keep deferring. The newer workflow removes the reason to defer it. Worth doing — worth doing this term, not next year.
Ready for headshots that match this advice?
See Profyle pricing →