A method for optimizing a photographing pose of a user, where the method is applied to an electronic device, and the method includes: displaying a photographing interface of a camera of the electronic device; obtaining a to-be-taken image in the photographing interface; determining, based on the to-be-taken image, that the photographing interface includes a portrait; entering a pose recommendation mode; and presenting a recommended human pose picture to a user in a predetermined preview manner, where the human pose picture is at least one picture that is selected from a picture library through metric learning and that has a top-ranked similarity to the to-be-taken image, and where the similarity is an overall similarity obtained by fusing a background similarity and a foreground similarity.