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You can use a group photo, but never as your first photo and never more than one. A group photo in the lead position is the single most expensive mistake on a dating profile: the viewer has about a second, and if they cannot tell which person you are, they swipe rather than work it out.
One group photo further down is useful - it shows you have a life with people in it - as long as you are unmistakably the subject of it. Put it somewhere in the middle of the set, after the viewer already knows your face.
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The value of a good group photo is social proof in the plain sense: it shows you have friends, that people enjoy your company, and that you are comfortable in a group. A profile made entirely of solo selfies can read as isolated even when it is not, and one shot of you laughing at a friend's wedding or around a birthday dinner table corrects that quickly.
It also shows how you look when you are relaxed and not posing, which is often more attractive than a careful solo shot. Its job is to support the rest of the profile, not to carry it.
Show the photo to someone who has never met you and ask them to point at you. If they hesitate at all, the photo does not go on the profile.
The common failure is subtler than being lost in a crowd of eight. A photo of three friends where you are not central, not in focus, or not the one looking at the camera fails the same test.
Run the test on a phone screen at the size the app will show it, not on a laptop. A face that is easy to find on a big monitor can be tiny in a thumbnail, and that is the size most people judge it at.
A group photo invites a comparison you did not ask for. If the person next to you photographs better, that is who the viewer looks at, and some people will simply prefer them and move on.
This is not vanity advice. It is the reason a good solo photo usually outperforms a better group photo of the same person.
The same applies to who else is in the shot. Avoid photos where someone has an arm around you in a way that could read as a partner, or where there is a child who could be mistaken for yours. Each of these raises a question the viewer will not stop to ask - they will just move on.
Cropping a group photo down to just you is usually worse than leaving it, because the result is low resolution, oddly framed, and often has a stray shoulder or hand at the edge. If you crop, make sure the result looks like a deliberate photo and not a rescue.
Other mistakes worth avoiding: a dim night-out photo where everyone is holding drinks, a shot where your face is half hidden by sunglasses or a hat, and a set where the same friends appear in three different pictures. Several group shots in a row make the viewer do the 'which one is you' work again and again, and each repetition costs attention.
The strongest set is a clear solo lead photo, a full-length shot, something showing an actual activity, and then at most one photo with other people. Four to six photos total.
For example, a strong order might be: a clear head-and-shoulders shot in daylight, a full-length photo outdoors, you cooking, hiking, or playing an instrument, a shot with two or three friends where you are in the middle and in focus, and one more solo photo that shows a different side of you. Five photos, each doing a different job.
If your only good photos are group photos, that is worth solving directly - a friend with a phone and twenty minutes in decent daylight outperforms every photo you already own. It is a small effort for the photos that do the most work.
If you move a group photo out of the lead position or replace it, give the new order at least a week or two before deciding whether it worked. Match numbers swing from day to day for reasons that have nothing to do with your photos, so compare a full week before and after rather than reacting to a single evening. Change one thing at a time, so you know what did it.