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Face Search

How to Reverse Image Search a Person, Step by Step

· 6 min read · Mirabu team

To reverse image search a person, save their photo or take a screenshot, upload it to Google Lens, Bing Visual Search or TinEye, and look for the same picture anywhere else online. If the face turns up under a different name, on a model's portfolio or on a years-old account, the profile you're talking to probably isn't who it claims to be. All three tools are free and take a couple of minutes. No match isn't proof the photo is genuine, though, and the limits below explain why.

Before you start

  • Save the photo. On a dating app or Instagram, a screenshot is fine. Crop it so the person fills most of the frame and the app's buttons are gone.
  • Check more than one photo. Scammers often mix stolen pictures with a few that are harder to trace. Search every photo you've been sent, not just the profile picture.
  • Use more than one tool. Each search engine has its own index, so one may find what another misses.

Google Lens on a phone

These steps follow Google's help page.

  1. Open the Google app. Chrome works too, and on iPhone so does Safari.
  2. Tap the Google Lens icon in the search bar.
  3. Pick the saved photo or screenshot from your gallery.
  4. Drag the corners of the box so it covers just the face. Google notes that selecting a smaller area gives more specific results.
  5. Scroll down to see matching and similar images and the websites they appear on.

If the photo is on a web page, touch and hold it and choose Search image with Google Lens. In Chrome on iPhone the option is called Search image with Google. In Chrome, this only works when Google is your default search engine.

Google Lens on a computer

  1. Go to google.com and click the Search by image icon in the search box.
  2. Click Upload a file and choose the photo, or drag it straight into the box. You can also paste the image's web address.
  3. In Chrome there's a shortcut: right-click any image on a page and choose Search with Google Lens. The results open in a side panel.

Microsoft's instructions are short:

  1. On a computer, open the Images tab on Bing, or go to Bing Images, and select the camera icon in the search box.
  2. Drag in an image, upload one from your computer, or paste an image or its link.
  3. On a phone, open Visual Search in Bing and take a photo or choose one you've saved.

It's a useful second opinion, because it's a different search engine with its own results.

TinEye

TinEye is free for non-commercial use. You can upload a file, paste an image, enter an image address or drag a picture onto the search page. It works in phone browsers (there's no app), and it has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera.

TinEye differs from Lens in one important way: it looks for copies of that exact image, not other photos of the same person. It doesn't recognize faces and can't find different pictures of the same people. That makes it good at one job: showing that a specific photo has been online for longer than the profile has.

Use the Sort by menu and choose Oldest. The date shown is when TinEye's crawler first saw the image, not when it was taken or first posted, so read it as "online since at least this date".

How to read the results

  • The same face under a different name or in a different country. This is the clearest red flag.
  • A model portfolio, stock photo site or influencer account. Attractive, well-lit photos are the ones most often taken.
  • An old copy. If the picture was online years before this profile appeared, someone may have lifted it.
  • Only the profile itself, or nothing at all. That's reassuring, but not conclusive.

If a photo turns out to belong to someone else, report the profile to the platform where you found it rather than getting into an argument with whoever runs it.

Private photos don't show up. Search engines can only find images that are public and indexed. Pictures taken from a private account or someone's phone may produce no matches at all.

AI-generated faces won't match anything. A face made by an AI tool belongs to no one, so there's nothing to find. The FBI warns that criminals use AI to create realistic images for fake social media profiles. Signs a face may be generated:

  • Hands with the wrong number of fingers, mismatched earrings, or glasses whose two sides don't match.
  • Skin that looks airbrushed and too perfect.
  • Writing on clothes or signs in the background that turns into gibberish.
  • A tightly cropped face with the eyes in the middle of the frame and a blurry or plain background.
  • Shadows and lighting that don't agree with each other.

None of these is proof, and newer generators make fewer mistakes. A tip sheet from digital forensics researcher Hany Farid also warns that ordinary image compression creates odd artifacts in real photos, so don't read too much into any single glitch. Combine what you see with other checks: how old the account is, whether their story holds together and whether they'll do a short video call.

Mirabu Face Search as one more option

If you'd rather not run three separate searches, Mirabu's Face Search checks where a photo shows up online, whether it seems to have been taken from other profiles, and the oldest copy it can find. It's an iPhone and Android app with two free scans a day and no account needed. The person you're checking is never notified, and uploads are deleted from Mirabu's servers within 24 hours. Like the free tools, its results are signals, not proof.

If a photo does turn out to be borrowed, our guide on how to tell if someone is catfishing you covers what to do next.

Questions people ask

Will the person know I searched their photo?

No. You're searching with the image, not interacting with their account, so they get no alert.

Why did I get no results?

The photo may be private, heavily cropped, generated by AI or simply genuine. Try a different photo, crop closer to the face, and run it through a second tool.

Can I search a photo from WhatsApp or Snapchat?

Yes. Save it or take a screenshot, crop it, and upload it to any of the tools above.

Which tool is best?

There's no single winner. Google Lens is the easiest on a phone, TinEye is the one to use for the oldest copy of an exact image, and Bing is a good second opinion.

Sources

Related terms: Catfishing

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