How often to update your headshot.

The calendar is the wrong instrument.

This question almost always arrives as a number, and a number is the one thing that cannot answer it. Two people can be carrying photographs of exactly the same age. One of them has changed nothing visible since the shutter closed and is perfectly well served. The other has changed their hair, their glasses, their title and their line of work, and is showing strangers a picture of somebody else.

An interval is only ever a stand-in for change. It exists because change is hard to notice in a mirror you look into daily, so people reach for a rule instead. You can skip the stand-in and measure the change directly, which is what the rest of this page is for.

The complete guide to professional headshots covers what a headshot is and how a sitting is built. This page covers one narrow question: how to know when the one you already have has stopped working.

Trigger one: you no longer look like it.

This is the loudest trigger and the easiest to check. The changes that break a photograph fastest are the structural ones, not the subtle ones: hair cut short or grown long, a color change, a beard grown or taken off, bangs added, or frames on a face that now wears contacts. Whether to keep glasses on in a headshot is a decision of its own, and it has its own page.

Faces also change slowly in ways that are invisible to you and obvious to everyone else. You see your own face in small increments every morning. Someone opening your profile sees it in one jump, and if the jump between the picture and the person is large enough, the first moment of a meeting gets spent on reconciliation instead of on you.

The test is simple and unkind. Hold the photograph up next to your face in a mirror. If you find yourself explaining the difference, even silently, the photograph has expired.

Trigger two: your role or your field moved.

A photograph is made for an audience. When the audience changes, the photograph often has to as well, even if your face has not moved a millimeter. Stepping into leadership, taking a seat on a board, going independent, or moving into a field with different visual habits all change who is looking and what they need to read.

A promotion or a new role is the most common version of this, and it has its own page because the timing around an announcement matters. If the move is sideways into a different industry, the conventions of the new field are worth a look before you shoot, and headshot styles by industry lays those out.

The shorthand: if the sentence under your name has changed, look at the picture above it.

Trigger three: the file cannot do the job.

Photographs are asked to do more over time. A picture made for one profile gets pressed into service for a conference program that needs print resolution, a bio grid that wants a horizontal crop, a speaker listing that wants a tight square, and eventually a printed page where every weakness is enlarged.

The symptoms are practical rather than emotional:

• You keep cropping tighter to make it fit, and the head is now cut oddly at the top.
• Someone asks for a horizontal version and there is no room on either side of you.
• The file goes soft the moment it is used larger than a thumbnail.
• You send it with a sentence of apology attached.
• You need a different shape for a profile circle than for the photos on your personal website About page, and you only own one frame.

This is a solvable problem in a single sitting, because several looks and several crops come out of the same planning conversation rather than several separate bookings. The circle is the format that exposes it fastest, and the LinkedIn profile photo guide covers what that particular crop demands.

Trigger four: you have started avoiding it.

This is the most reliable signal and the one nobody writes down. You are asked for a photograph and you feel a small drop before you go looking for the file. You choose a different picture for the thing that actually matters. You add the words "it is a bit old" when you attach it. Perhaps you put off the request for a day and hope it goes away.

That hesitation is information you have already collected about your own photograph. It means you do not believe it represents you, and if you do not believe it, you will keep hedging every time you use it. A picture you send without thinking is worth more than a technically better one you send reluctantly.

It is worth saying plainly that dreading the sitting itself is not the same thing as dreading the photograph. Almost nobody enjoys being photographed, which is exactly why every session here is directed head to toe: you are told where the chin goes, what the hands do and where to look, so there is nothing to invent on the spot.

What dates a photograph when your face has not.

A picture can age on its own. The tells are mostly craft decisions that were fashionable when it was made, and they read as clearly as a haircut does:

• Retouching style. Skin smoothed until the texture is gone reads as a particular era rather than as a person.
• Background fashion. Heavily mottled canvas, hard dark corners and dramatic edge burn all place a photograph in time.
• Wardrobe silhouette. Lapel width, shoulder line and collar shape date faster than color does.
• Crop convention. Very loose head-and-shoulders framing looks different from the closer crops that small screens now demand.
• Resolution. A file made for a small screen years ago looks soft on the screens people carry now.

One useful consequence: a black and white headshot often ages more slowly, because it removes the color cast and some of the wardrobe cues that date fastest. It is not immune, it simply loses one of the clocks.

The broader list of what makes a photograph work or fail, including the mistakes that have nothing to do with age, lives in the dos and don'ts of a headshot.

The second sitting is easier than the first.

If it has been a while, the thing standing between you and a current photograph is usually the memory of the last one. That is worth reframing. A second sitting starts from a position the first one never had: you already know what you did not like, which is the most useful planning material there is.

Bring the old photograph. "Warmer than this", "less severe than this", "not this crop" are precise instructions, and they are far easier to give than describing a picture that does not exist yet. Wardrobe gets planned together before you arrive, several backdrops and changes come out of one sitting, the files are retouched by hand, and the private gallery lands within the week.

If you want to see the range before you decide, the headshot sessions page shows the work, and LinkedIn headshots covers the crop that usually goes up first.