Non-explicit, consistent, and yours

The listing image is checked before anything you wrote, and it has to satisfy three constraints at once: not explicit, actually yours, and the same one everywhere. Most new earners solve the first and fail the second, usually by taking something from a search result because it looked professional.

Why borrowed images fail

Reverse image search is instant and free, and a buyer deciding whether to send money to a stranger is exactly the person who runs one.

The finding is never neutral. An image traced to a stock library reads as a placeholder; one traced to another person reads as a misrepresentation, and the buyer does not stop to work out which you intended. Either way the doubt attaches to the work, and you are never told - the enquiry simply does not arrive.

It is also a legal problem: in the UK, copyright protects photography automatically, so using someone else's picture needs their permission. Most marketplaces prohibit images you do not have rights to, and enforcement is complaint-driven, so it arrives at the worst moment and lands as a suspension rather than a warning. A suspension for an honest mistake is indistinguishable from one for a dishonest mistake, which is the general argument for reading the rules first.

What actually works

Something you made, that is not explicit, and that says something about the work rather than about you.

The options that hold up: a photograph you took of a neutral subject, a typographic mark made in any free tool in twenty minutes, or a graphic you commissioned with written permission to use it. A photograph of yourself works only if you have decided to work under a name rather than an alias, which is a much larger decision - the anonymity trade-off is worth settling before the image question, not after.

The options that do not: anything from an image search, any photograph containing another identifiable person, and anything you also use on a personal account.

Non-explicit is a lower bar than it sounds

Every mainstream platform, payment processor and app store draws this line somewhere, and their lines differ. An image that passes on one platform can fail on another, and a processor's rules can be stricter than the marketplace's - the failure that quietly costs you a payout rather than a listing.

The safe construction is an image carrying no anatomical content at all: typography, objects, texture, colour. It is the only version that survives every reviewer and every future rule change.

The hazards specific to images - metadata, reuse, what a reverse search can recover - are covered properly on the photo side of the network, and are worth reading once whether or not the image contains you. If you are photographing your own equipment as a subject, the gear reference will tell you what you are actually showing, which matters if the picture implies a capability you do not have.

Consistency, and the metadata step

Use one image across every platform, at the same crop. It is how a buyer who liked you elsewhere recognises you here, and the cheapest part of keeping listings aligned across platforms.

Before you upload it, strip the metadata. A phone photograph carries a timestamp and frequently a GPS location; most platforms strip it on upload, not all do, and you should not rely on that. Any basic image tool exports a copy without it.

Then leave it alone for a year, because an image that keeps changing breaks the recognition it exists to create. The one time to replace it is when it has visibly aged, because a stale image is one of the strongest dormancy signals a buyer picks up - recency is read as reliability.

Buyers describe the image as a check rather than a draw: it does not win the booking, and the wrong one loses it, which matches their account of what makes a listing look safe to commission.

The specific image dimensions, formats and content rules for a Rate Cock listing are on the judges page, and they are stricter than the general advice here.