Every attempt to photograph a whole company meets the same objections, in roughly the same order.
"I don't want to upload photographs of my face"
The one to take most seriously. Fifteen images of a person from different angles is a different category of data from one photograph, and an employee noticing that is not being difficult.
The only workable response is that declining is genuinely costless, stated by the employer rather than buried in a vendor's terms. The full set of objections treats them fairly.
"It'll look fake"
The one worth arguing with, and the honest answer is to test rather than assert. These systems fail on particular faces — strong prescription glasses, tightly curled hair, darker skin tones, marked asymmetry — so test on those first, not on the most photogenic person in the company.
"We already did this two years ago"
Correct, and an argument for changing approach. That set no longer matches, because everyone hired since is not in it.
What "studio quality" actually describes
A lighting setup, not a place. The approximation of it is real for the controllable half — light and background — and not for the other half, which is a person watching and correcting you.
The uniform case, which is genuinely harder
Company uniforms turn clothing from a preference into a specification, which makes generated approaches harder rather than easier: the system has to reproduce a specific garment consistently rather than infer one.
The smile question, and what is actually decidable
Whether to smile is answered definitively in both directions across the internet, which is a reliable sign nobody knows.
What is decidable is geometric: at the size these images are displayed, a broad smile is legible and a slight one is not. If the image will be seen small, ambiguity in expression is simply lost.
The hardest output format
A business card photograph. The face ends up about fifteen millimetres tall, which strips everything except the outline and forces high contrast. Anything optimised for a screen disappears there.
General business portrait guidance covers the rest, read as convention rather than instruction.
Disclosure: I work on an AI headshot generator.
