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Almost always the first photo. On Hinge the opening card is one photo and a name, and that is the entire decision most people make. If that photo fails, nothing else on your profile is ever seen.
Three failures account for most of it: the lead photo contains other people, your face is obscured, or it is a mirror or car selfie. Fix those first, in that order, before touching your prompts - prompts only matter once someone has stopped scrolling.
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This is the most common mistake and the most expensive. A stranger gives your card about three seconds and will not do detective work to establish which person you are. A group shot in position one reads as 'friend of someone'.
Move every group photo further back. Position one should be one person: you. Group photos are still worth having later in the set, because they show you have a life, but only once the viewer already knows which face is yours.
The same applies to photos with a child, a date, or someone who could be read as an ex. Even when the explanation is innocent - a niece, a sister, a friend's wedding - it raises a question you are not there to answer. Crop if you can, and otherwise move it down.
Sunglasses, a hat brim, a hand, harsh backlighting, or a landscape shot where you are forty pixels tall. All of these read as concealment, even when the truth is just a bad crop. Heavy filters belong on this list as well, since they make it hard to tell what you actually look like.
You want one photo that is unambiguously your face in decent light. It does not need to be professional. It needs to be legible. The easiest version is a friend taking a few shots of you outdoors in daylight, standing in open shade rather than direct sun, framed from about the chest up, and you picking the one where you look relaxed rather than posed.
Both signal the same thing: nobody takes photos of me. That is a read about your social life rather than your face, and it is very hard to argue with once it lands.
One is survivable further down the set. In position one it is doing real damage. If a mirror selfie is the only full-body photo you have, that is a reason to get a better one taken, not a reason to lead with it.
Six photos, varied. One clear head-and-shoulders. One full body - its absence is read as concealment whether or not that is fair. One of you doing something you actually do. One social photo where you are still obviously the subject.
Not six angles of the same shirt in the same room. Variety of setting, clothing, and season makes the profile look like a life rather than a single afternoon. Good examples are cooking in your kitchen, on a trail you actually hike, at a friend's dinner table, or at a wedding where you are clearly the one being photographed.
Also check how old your photos are. If the set is from several years ago, or shows a noticeably different haircut or build, the people who do match may feel misled on a first date, and that costs you more than a slightly less flattering current photo.
'Ask me about my cooking' is a task, not an opener. You are asking a stranger to do work before they have any reason to.
Give the answer and a hook instead: 'I make a genuinely unreasonable carbonara - ask me about the time I tried it for twelve people.' Now there is something to reply to. The same move works for any prompt: a specific detail plus a loose end the other person can pull on.
Avoid answers that apply to everyone, like 'travel, food, and good company'. A mild opinion works well, such as 'the best breakfast in town is the diner nobody talks about', because people like to agree or argue. Hinge lets people like or comment on an individual prompt, so each one is another place a conversation can start.
Change the lead photo first and leave everything else alone for a week or two. If you change five things at once and matches improve, you will not know which change did it, and if they get worse you will not know what to undo. Hinge does not publish how it decides who sees your profile, so the only reliable measure is your own match count over a few weeks.
Daily numbers swing for reasons that have nothing to do with you - weekends, holidays, the weather, how many people near you happen to be active. Compare week to week, not day to day.
If your photos are clear and varied, your prompts give people something to answer, and you still get very little, check your settings before rewriting anything else. A very tight distance radius, a narrow age range, or a long list of dealbreaker filters in a small town can shrink the pool until there is simply not much to match with. Widen one setting at a time and see whether anything changes.
Some places are just quieter. A small town, a narrow set of preferences, or a very specific requirement will produce fewer matches no matter how good the profile is, and that is a numbers problem rather than a judgment of you. In that case patience and a slightly wider radius help more than another round of photo changes.