Headshot fundamentals

Do you still need professional headshots in 2026?

Phones have good cameras now. AI can generate a passable face from a selfie in seconds. It's a fair question — so here's a fair answer, split by scenario rather than by sales pitch.

Yes, get one

You're applying for jobs and your current photo is from a wedding, a night out, or more than three years old.
You're an actor, model or performer — casting and agents expect industry-standard headshots, not phone photos.
You're client-facing — your face is on a company website, a proposal deck, or a "meet the team" page.
You've changed your appearance significantly (hair, weight, glasses, a beard grown or shaved) since your last set.
You're building a personal brand and post regularly — a consistent, well-lit face across platforms compounds over time.
You're job-hunting in a competitive field where recruiters skim LinkedIn photos in under a second.

Probably skip it

You need a photo for an internal Slack or Teams profile nobody outside the company sees.
You already have a professional set from within the last year or two that still looks like you.
You need one photo, once, for a form that will never be seen publicly (an internal badge, an RSVP list).
A decent phone selfie against a plain wall, in good daylight, genuinely does the job for a low-stakes, low-visibility use.
Your current photo is fine and your instinct to update it is more about mood than need.

The honest middle ground

Most people sit between these two lists. A perfectly good phone photo can carry you for a while on low-stakes profiles. Where it stops working is anywhere your photo is doing active work — getting you shortlisted, getting you cast, getting a stranger to trust you before you've said a word. That's the line: if the photo has a job to do, it's worth getting it done properly.

Fresh evidence you can check yourself: pull up your current LinkedIn or CV photo next to a recent one of you in the mirror. If a stranger wouldn't immediately clock it as the same person, or the lighting and crop look like a screenshot rather than a photograph, that's your answer.