Why Photo Ranking Works Better Than Photo Rating
- Ben G.
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
Unlike many Photo Rating websites, we don't rate your photos on a scale of 1 - 10. Instead, we rank your photos against each other for a given purpose
Say you're building your dating profile and staring at your camera roll. You're choosing between 6 decent photos as the "silly" photo of your Tinder / Hinge / Bumble profile and you can only pick 1. Which one makes the cut?
Ranking photos gives better results, faster, and it does this while letting you feel better about yourself and being more fun for our users.
Here's what photo rating websites ask you to do:
Upload photo number 1, get it rated 1 - 10
Upload photo number 2, get it rated 1 - 10
Upload photo number 3, get it rated 1 - 10
Upload photo number x, ...
Look at all these rated photos and try to figure out which scores mean what and how they compare to each other under the "fun" category and if you should use them at all or higher rated "hot" photos that don't showcase your personality.
Here's what RankPic asks you to do:
Upload all 6 photos together, get them ranked in order of best "silly Tinder photo".
I built RankPic based on this difference. To use ranking (your photos ranked against each other, for a specific use case) instead of rating (giving your photo a number 1-10). Ranking photos gives better results, faster, and it does this while letting you feel better about yourself and being more fun for our users.
Actually - Context Matters
When rating apps ask "how attractive is this photo from 1-10?" — they're asking the wrong question.
When you're building a dating profile, you're not asking "is this a 7.5 or an 8?" You're asking "should I replace one of my existing Tinder pictures with one of these 3 new ones?" Or "which of these 6 photos works best as my Hinge main picture?"
Photo ranking lets you set custom context for each test. Testing out which selfie highlights your butt the best to send to your "friend"? You can label it that way. Choosing which pair of glasses frames to buy (real use case we see often by the way)? You can specify that too. The people ranking your photos see this context and make decisions based on what you actually need.
Rating apps give you a score in a vacuum and leave you guessing about your rater's mindset. RankPic lets you make real decisions.
You Can Get Your Answer Way Faster
Let's do the math.
With a rating system, each photo needs to be rated alone in its own test. Trying to figure out which of 10 photos you should use for your dating profile? That's 10 different tests.
With RankPic, you can create a test of up to 6 photos at a time. That's 6 photos ranked in the same time a rating website rates one photo.
What about after 6 photos? Well thanks to our leaderboard feature, as long as you have 1 photo overlapping between tests, your tests will get merged into a single ranking. So you could get 11 photos ranked in order in 2 tests, in the same time that a rating website will rate 2 photos.
And this scales up, because for every single photo you create a test for and get "rated", RankPic will have a test of up to 6 photos for ranking. With 1 photo for overlapping reference, you can rank 5 new photos for each 1 photo a rating website does.
RankPic saves you 80%+ of the time!
Even more important than saving time though, is that this unlocks the ability to test many many more photos, so you can be certain that you are actually putting your best foot forward, and not that you got bored after a month of rating your 20 photos one by one.
RankPic Results Are Actually Consistent
Maybe you're thinking "okay, but do rating systems at least give me consistent results I can trust?"
Maybe. If you're lucky, and do it within the proper time frame.
The same photo can get a 6.2 from one group of raters and an 8.1 from another group. Is that because the photo got better? No. It's because rating is subjective and people use scales differently. Some people think "7 is pretty good," while others reserve 7s and above for incredibly rare photos.
Okay, so rating systems allege that if they use fancy statistics, they can normalize people's ratings over time and "force it to be consistent". That sounds good, but there are serious flaws!
Their rating user base changes over time, and their testing user base changes over time.
This means their scores will drift, and no amount of fancy statistics will paper that over. That means that by the time you're done testing 20 photos, the results won't actually let you cross compare!
Just to list a few problems:
Other users rating your photos change daily! - Different people rating on different days or different weeks means they have different preferences. This doesn't matter when they rank all your photos at the same time, but if they rate your photos individually your photos may not score consistently!
Other users getting their photos tested change daily! - If the rating website normalizes scores across people, what happens if there's a statistically anomalous amount of people in certain bands? Ex. one day you're normalized to the top 10% of people, the next day a group of models join and you're in the top 30% of people.
Other users will change their ratings as they see more of you - Okay, so if you try to fit all your tests in really quickly in an attempt to deal with the above issues (won't work, but for arguments sake), your raters will get to know you and this changes their relative scores!
Don't believe me? Here's a great post from Reddit complaining about this very thing!
RankPic photo ranking eliminates this problem. When someone ranks your photos, they're not trying to calibrate their personal 1-10 scale. They're simply deciding: is Photo A better than Photo B better than Photo C for your dating profile? That's a much more reliable measurement.
If Photo A consistently ranks higher than Photo B across 20 different people, you can trust that result. Photo A is better. End of story.
You Don't Have to Feel Like a Number
Here's the part that was really important to me when deciding to build RankPic: nobody should be a 4.2/10 on somebody's arbitrary rating system.
Nobody needs to see a 2.1, a 4.3 or a 6.0 rating staring back at them.
These rating websites use statistics to grade on a curve, and try to normalize it so that the ratings fall on a distribution. Well that means that for every person that finds out their photos are a 9, there is another person that finds out they are a 2.
I'm sure this works out well for people that discover they are 9s and 10s, but what about the rest of us? Well, here are a few posts from some unlucky souls who had their confidence crushed:
Photo rating can feel brutal because it reduces you to a number. It's hard not to internalize that score, even though it's supposed to be about the photo, not you as a person. Especially when you receive the same range of scores over and over again.
Photo ranking is different. You're not being scored. Your photos are being compared to each other. There's no "bad" photo — just "better" and "best." The feedback is constructive: this one works better than that one.
The emotional difference is real. With ranking, you're not wondering "am I attractive enough?" You're learning "which version of me comes across best in photos?"
You shouldn't have to make 5 different tests to figure out which of your 5 photos is best. You should always be able to trust the results are accurate. And you shouldn't have the potential to get your soul crushed in the process.
It's More Fun for the People Helping You 🙂
Ranking photos with numbers is not fun. It doesn't feel good to reduce another human to a number. It takes a lot of mental energy to decide how good a photo is numerically.
Alternatively, using RankPic is fun! Ranking people's photos from best to worst is clear cut, simple, enjoyable. It's far more fun to rank people's photos with a reference. Plus, you're helping people without feeling bad about it, and without the thought that you have the potential of ruining their self confidence.
The Bottom Line
Photo ranking isn't just a different approach — it's a better approach for what you actually need when building your dating profile.
Ranking gives you that answer faster, more reliably, and without making you feel like you're being judged on a scale. It respects the fact that context matters, that you're testing photos against each other (not against some impossible standard), and that you deserve feedback that actually helps.
Ready to Find Your Best Photo?
RankPic makes it easy to get unbiased feedback on your photos in just a few hours. Upload 2-6 photos, get them ranked by real people, and see which one comes out on top.