In the US, UK, Canada and Australia, leaving it off is usually the safer default, and in some cases including one can work against you before anyone has read a word about your experience. In much of continental Europe, a photo is still customary and its absence can read as unusual. Which country’s convention applies to you matters more than any general rule about photos.
That split is not arbitrary, and it is worth understanding why it exists, because the reason also tells you what a photo does and does not do for you where it is expected.
Why the advice splits by country
In the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, employment discrimination law makes hiring decisions based on age, race, or gender a real legal exposure. A photo puts all three in front of a reader before anything else does, and one of the ways a company protects itself is by keeping that information out of the hiring process for as long as possible. Some employers strip photos on sight for exactly this reason. It is not that a photo is rude. It is that it creates a specific kind of risk for the company reading it, and companies that are careful about hiring tend to be careful about that risk.
In much of continental Europe, the convention runs the other way, and a CV without a photo can read as incomplete rather than neutral. Neither convention is more correct. They come from different legal and cultural starting points, and the practical move is to follow the one that applies to where you are actually applying, not the one you read about first.
What a photo is actually doing, where it is expected
A note on where this comes from. I worked as a recruiter, at a staffing company placing blue-collar roles, and I interviewed for administrative positions, in a market where photos were not the norm. What follows about the markets where they are expected is the general reasoning behind the convention, not a first-hand account of screening in those markets, and it should be weighed that way.
Where a photo is customary, it functions as a completeness signal more than an evaluation input. A CV that is missing one in a market that expects it can read as unfinished or foreign to local practice, which is its own kind of friction, separate from anything about the person’s qualifications. It is rarely the thing that gets someone shortlisted. It is sometimes the thing that gets a document a second look instead of a faster skip, purely because it matches what the reader expected to see.
What a photo never buys you, anywhere
A photo does not make the experience section stronger, faster to read, or better targeted at the posting. Every reason a CV actually gets rejected, buried relevant experience, duty language instead of outcomes, a document aimed at nobody in particular, sits below the photo and is untouched by whether one is there. Spending time on a photo instead of on the content it sits above is time spent on the part that was never deciding the outcome.
If you are not sure which convention applies
Applying within one country is straightforward: follow that country’s default. Applying across borders is where it gets genuinely ambiguous, and the honest answer is that there is no single right call. A useful proxy is the country the employer is headquartered or hiring from, not the country you happen to be applying from, since that is closer to whose norms and whose legal exposure actually govern the process.
What not to conclude
Do not conclude a photo will get you noticed. In markets where it is unusual, at best it is neutral and at worst it introduces exactly the risk employers are trying to avoid.
Do not conclude the absence of a photo signals anything about you personally. In markets where it is unusual, its absence is simply the default, not a gap.
Do not spend real time agonising over the photo itself. Whichever way the convention points, the choice is binary and the effect is small next to everything else on the page.
The short version
The photo question is a genuinely local convention, not a universal rule, and it exists because of a real, specific reason: employment discrimination exposure in some countries, cultural expectation in others. Get that one call right for wherever you are applying and stop thinking about it. Everything that actually decides a rejection or a callback sits in the text below the photo, not in the photo.
Our tool treats the photo as what it is: one optional field. It never nudges anyone toward adding one, and a CV built without it is exactly as complete as one built with it.