As someone who is relatively new to the whole online dating scene - having been made sexually redundant in the wake of the implosion of a two year relationship a couple of months (62 days, 9 hours and 28 minutes) ago, there are a lot of things that seem strange and incomprehensible about the whole charade.
Not to get on a high horse about anything here - firstly I'm scared of horses, secondly I under no circumstances think that it is acceptable to get a horse 'high'- but there is one absolutely mind-numbingly infuriating mistake that is made by a sizeable enough percentage of people that I've been compelled, in lieu of there being other actually important things to write about, to rail against.
That mistake is this: people crop photos like absolute hooligans.
You can casually be perusing through some people's profiles, when suddenly out of nowhere, you're blind-sided by an inexplicably zoomed in snapshot of someone's shin. Now, unless these people are in fact cyber-dating genius and are playing some kind of next-level mind-games, which I seriously doubt, then we've got some serious questions on our hands.
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Sometimes, it may just be the fourth or fifth photo in someone's profile that is terribly cropped, and this is somewhat excusable as, they've evidently already shown enough mastery of actually framing a photograph that this can be excused as a momentary lapse. What is truly galling is when you're swiping through profiles; carefully selected headshots etc. and then someone has chosen to lead with a photograph which has been cropped to mostly feature a dressing table in the background with a disembodied ear floating unceremoniously in the corner of the frame, where presumably the rest of the photographers face and head resides.
Sometimes, some expertly worked cropping can make for a fantastic photo, it would be a grim world were everyone's photos to look utterly interchangeable; however it is very obvious when the cropping is deliberate or when it's simply accidentally zoomed in on a grainy shot of someone's right nostril. If the cropping on a photograph makes it look like it's been cut up by a child attempting to make some kind of slightly ominous Art Attack-esque collage out of dismembered photographs of people's faces, then it's probably best to do a bit of editing.
