Have you decided, by all means, to find the girl or young man you are interested in online, but all you have is her (his) photograph? On this page we talk about the most popular sites, programs and technologies that allow you to search for people by photo online.
Let's make a reservation right away: in order to find a person from a photograph, you need to have a portrait shot of the best possible quality and resolution, made if possible in full face. If there are other people in the photo, in addition to the object of your interest, the picture will have to be cropped and, possibly, processed in a photo editor. How to optimize the quality of a photo portrait for a successful search, we will tell further.
Search through the Search4Faces service
Most Internet users use various specialized Internet services to search for people by photo. One of the most popular sites is Search4Faces, a resource that allows you to search for a face in a photo. One of the advantages of the service is that it works on the basis of modern machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies (neural networks). Thanks to this, it will take a few seconds to search for a person by photo, and the result will impress you.
At the moment, Search4Faces supports several options for searching for a person by photo in social networks. The following databases are available to users:
- TikTok.
- Clubhouse.
The immediate plans of the developers of the online service include searching for a person by photo online on Instagram, as well as many other social networks and Internet resources.
How to use Search4Faces? After selecting the database you are interested in and uploading a high-quality and high-definition photograph, neural networks process the information almost instantly and issue a “verdict” to the user. According to the information indicated on the site, it is easiest to search for a person by photo online using the VK avatars database. At the moment, more than a billion faces have been uploaded to this database, and the percentage of successfully processed requests is almost 69%. But according to TikTok avatars, neural networks have so far found no more than 10.5% of users. If the user you are interested in is not found, the creators of the resource advise using other databases located on the main page of Search4Faces to search for the right person by photo. We can say that today it is one of the best alternatives, allows you to find people by photo in social networks with minimal time. Also learn how much is service.
Google Images
One of the most popular tools in the world for searching for a person by photo is Google Images (Google Images). In order to use it, just go to the Google start page and select the icon with the image of the camera in the search bar. In the window that opens, you can either upload an image from your computer or specify a link (if you are using an image from another site). By the way, in this way, you can not only search for a person by photo, but also find duplicate images on the Internet in a matter of seconds (including those protected by copyright).
Perhaps the only drawback of this technology is that it is far from always possible to find a person’s page by photo through Google Pictures. In addition, in some cases, neural networks offer the user visually similar, but still different images. This often happens when insufficiently clear or too small low-quality digital images are used to search for faces. Another problem is that in the described way, searching for a person by photo on the Internet can only be performed in the browser version for a PC.
How to search from a mobile device
By the way, the restriction described above also applies to many other mobile versions of sites. In particular, you will not be able to find a person's profile by photo using the mobile version of Chrome or a similar application from Google Play. Before you can search for people by photo in this way from a mobile device, you will have to set the “PC version” in the settings. However, in this case, your actions may not be successful. The only working option is to search for a person by photo on the Internet using programs specially designed for this. They can be found and downloaded from the Google Play and App Store app stores. Keep in mind that some apps may be fully paid or shareware. We recommend that you read the reviews of other users before downloading and paying,
There is
One of the oldest online search services. We want to warn you right away that with the help of Tineye you will not always find a person by photo. At the same time, over the years of its existence, a really very large database of photographic images has been formed here, and Tiny has almost the same chances of success as Google Images. Just like in other cases, this popular photo search engine can be used to identify duplicate graphic content on a wide variety of sites, as well as in social networks. In many cases, TinEye allows you to find the photos you are interested in even on Instagram (which is far from always possible with many other analogues).
Browser Extensions
In addition to downloadable programs and applications, as well as specialized sites and search engines, you can search for people by photo images on the network using plugins. Such extensions are installed in the "body" of the browser and do not take up much space. In addition, search plugins do not slow down the work of the browser itself and work quickly. As is the case with online neural network tools, they are able to find an image on the Internet in one to two seconds. Some extensions are equipped with additional functions - in particular, built-in tools for simple editing of sources or results. Also today you can download embedded plugins for social networks (for example, extensions specially designed to search for stolen photos in VKontakte).
How to Make Searching Easier: Preparing Your Photo
Keep in mind that in any of the cases described, the result will directly depend on the quality of the images used. If you want your actions to be successful, take care to prepare a photograph that will be used as a source.
- Before you find a person in a photo, crop it. If necessary, crop the picture so that the close-up of the face is as close to the center of the frame as possible.
- If you are using a group photo, you have to cut out the person you are interested in, and then, if necessary, increase the resulting image (its size and resolution) without sacrificing quality. To do this, you can use special services, for example, Let's Enhance and the like. If you are an advanced user of Adobe products, you can also do this with them.
- We advise you to improve the brightness and contrast of the photo, as well as increase its sharpness, if possible. Even the simplest ones, including built-in photo editors, not to mention Photoshop, do an excellent job with such a task today.
Why can't you find the person you are interested in?
You need to understand that with all the "advancement" of modern technologies (including those built on the basis of artificial intelligence and neural networks), their mechanisms and tools are still very far from perfect. It is often much easier to find an exact copy (duplicate) of a picture online than other photos of the user you are interested in, as well as information about him.
Having experimented a little with the same Google Images and Tineye, you will see that the services almost accurately determine the places in the photo (if we are talking about famous tourist attractions), but at the same time they often experience certain difficulties with human faces. Therefore, we recommend using as many different search engines as possible in case of failure. Sometimes it also happens that there are simply no analogues of the photographs you are looking for on the Internet. In this case, it remains only to make repeated attempts after a while (for example, after a few months). After all, the bases of graphic content of Internet search engines are replenished literally every day.