It only shows up when your camera's off, but on a lot of teams that's most calls: quick syncs, phone screenings between meetings, the moments someone's fixing their wifi. A stretched, low-res photo, or worse, the default grey silhouette, is a small thing that quietly says nobody set this account up properly. It takes about two minutes to fix.
All three platforms want the same thing
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet all display your profile photo as a circle, and all three accept a square upload and crop it themselves if you let them. The cleanest approach is the same one that works for any circular avatar: crop the photo to a circle yourself first with our Circle Crop tool, so you can see exactly what's kept and what's cut before you upload it, rather than trusting each platform's own auto-crop to guess correctly.
A plain, well-lit headshot works better here than it does almost anywhere else on this list, because the context is entirely professional and nobody's looking for personality in it. Centered, shoulders up, reasonably current, that's the whole brief.
When the camera actually is on
The profile picture covers the camera-off moments, but plenty of calls involve a live video feed of whatever's actually behind you, and not everyone's background is call-ready. The standard fix is a virtual background, but virtual backgrounds have a well-known problem: hair and moving hands flicker in and out against the replacement image, especially with imperfect lighting.
A background blur avoids that specific failure mode; instead of replacing what's behind you, it keeps your real background but softens it, so a messy shelf or an open door becomes an out-of-focus shape instead of a distraction. If you want to see how this looks before a call, or you're prepping a static photo for a company directory or intranet profile, our Auto-Focus Portrait tool applies that same blur to a still photo, useful for exactly the kind of "headshot at my desk" photo most remote teams end up needing somewhere.
Consistency across tools, not just within one
If your company uses Zoom for external calls and Teams internally, it's worth using the same photo in both rather than whatever each app happened to pull from a different account. Coworkers build a mental map of faces to names over time, and a different photo in every tool works against that instead of with it.
Skip the silhouette, but don't overthink it
The one photo that reliably looks worse than any actual photo of you is the default placeholder icon, it reads as "this account was never finished being set up," even on a team you've been part of for years. Any clear, reasonably recent photo of your face beats it. This doesn't need to be a production; a phone photo near a window, cropped to a circle, clears the bar completely.
Set up your video call photo
Crop a circle avatar, or blur a distracting background. Free, private, no account.