Ryan Hoover hasn’t changed his profile picture for about 10 years now.

He talks about it on his blog “Why I Never Change My Profile Pic”:

People recognize you by your avatar. Once changed, followers need to re-associate the new photo with your person.

I very much agree: whenever someone changes their profile picture, it takes time to get used to it, and start recognizing their avatar in timelines again.

Back in 2014 I took a photo at the local photo studio Die Fotogräfin:

Felix Krause in 2014

2014

After a while, I didn’t like the fact that the profile picture isn’t updated at all, but also I wanted to follow Ryan’s advice. The solution?

Let’s take the exact same photo again, same shirt, same light, same background, and same pose:

Felix Krause in 2016

2016

I silently changed the profile picture on Twitter and GitHub, and almost no one noticed, with just a few tweets calling me out.

It even went that far, that Peter Steinberger covered my profile picture story in his conference talk about personal branding.

Using this approach, you can keep the recognition value, while making sure your current profile picture reflects on how you currently look like.

Following the “Continuous Delivery for your profile picture” approach, I took another one this year.

Felix Krause in 2018

2018

Again, almost no one noticed, with only one tweet mentioning it.

2022

It’s 2022, with long hair thanks to COVID, updated my picture on 7th September 2022, let’s see how many replies I’ll get.

Felix Krause in 2022

End-Result

So here are the last 7 years in profile pictures - I plan on continuing this strategy and take a new photo around every other year.