How Often Should You Update Your Personal Brand Photos?

If you’ve invested in a personal brand shoot, at some point you’re probably going to wonder how long those photos are supposed to last.

Six months? A year? Two years? Until you’ve used every single one so many times that even you’re fed up of seeing your own face?

There isn’t really a set expiry date on brand photography. How often you should update your personal brand photos depends much more on what’s happening in your business than how long it’s been since your last shoot.

Some businesses can happily use a strong set of images for a couple of years. Others can outgrow theirs surprisingly quickly.

The better question is: do your current photos still represent the business you have now?

Your business has moved on

Businesses change. Often quite gradually, which means you don’t always notice how much has changed until you look back.

Perhaps you’ve increased your prices or you’re working with different clients. Maybe you’ve launched a new service or your positioning has changed. But what if you simply feel much more established than you did when your last photographs were taken.

Your photos are part of how people judge your business before they ever speak to you.

If everything else about your business has moved up a level but your imagery still represents an earlier version of it, there can be a bit of a disconnect.

It doesn’t mean the old photographs are bad – they may have been exactly what you needed at the time

You keep using the same five photographs

You might technically have 100 photographs from your last shoot.

But how many are you actually using?

If you find yourself reaching for the same few photos every time you post on LinkedIn, using the same photograph on every sales page and scrolling through your gallery thinking none of these quite work, you probably don’t have the variety you need anymore.

This is one of the reasons I plan brand shoots around what the photographs actually need to do.

It isn’t just about creating lots of nice photographs of you. We need images that work for different subjects, different parts of your website and different types of marketing.

Because 100 photographs aren’t particularly useful if you’re only using a few of them now.

You’ve changed

Sometimes it isn’t the business that’s changed. It’s you.

New hair colour, or maybe some new. We gain weight, lose weight, get older and generally refuse to remain exactly as we were on the day of our last photoshoot.

You don’t need to rush out and replace your entire image library because you’ve had your fringe cut (if I did that I’d need new photos roughly every 3 months). But if someone meets you after seeing your website and your photographs clearly look like they were taken several years ago, it might be time.

Your brand photos should feel recognisably like you now.

Your visual brand has changed

Perhaps you’ve had a new website, changed your brand colours or completely repositioned the business.

Suddenly the photographs that looked perfect against your old website don’t sit quite right anymore. This is where planning a personal brand shoot properly becomes particularly important.

We can think about the colours you’re wearing, locations, backgrounds, props and even where text might need to sit on an image. The aim is to create photographs that belong in your brand rather than simply photographs that happen to feature you.

Your content has changed

The things you talk about today probably aren’t exactly the same things you were talking about two years ago.

Maybe you’re writing more thought-leadership content. Perhaps you’ve started a podcast, launched a newsletter, become a speaker or added new services.

Your photography needs to support those things.

If every time you create a piece of content you struggle to find an image that makes sense alongside it, that’s a pretty good indication that your photo library needs updating.

So, how often should you update your personal brand photos?

For many established business owners, having a brand shoot every year or so works well. It gives you the opportunity to refresh your imagery as the business evolves without constantly starting again from scratch.

But I wouldn’t book a shoot simply because twelve months have appeared on the calendar.

Instead, look at what you have.

• Do the photographs still look like you?
• Are they representing the level your business is at now?
• Do you have enough variety?
• Can they work with your current website and branding?
• Can you easily find an appropriate image when you’re creating something?

If the answer to most of those is yes, brilliant. Keep using them.

If you’ve started avoiding your own image library because you’ve used everything to death, that’s probably your answer.

Your next brand shoot should move things forward

When you do decide it’s time to update your personal brand photos, you don’t necessarily need to recreate what you did last time with different outfits.

A new shoot is an opportunity to look at where the business is going next.

What are you going to be selling? What do you want to be known for? What content are you planning? What needs changing on your website? What opportunities would you like to attract?

Those are the things I want to know before I pick up the camera.

Because the aim isn’t simply to give you some newer photographs – it’s to give you a useful bank of images that makes marketing your business easier.

If you’re looking through your current photographs and realising they belong to a slightly older version of your business, you can have a look at my personal brand photography packages and see which type of shoot would give you the library you need next.