Top 13 Face Recognition Search Engines in 2024

Social Catfish is a search engine focused on finding people online by name, email, phone number, username, address, and reverse image lookup. The tool scans various online sources to find the person, including social media profiles, government and educational websites, news articles, public databases, and professional records.

When searching with a person’s photo, Social Catfish analyzes the person’s face, paying attention to things like biometrics and shape. It takes these insights and compares them with billions of photos online. It then emails you a report containing the information it found, including the person’s name, addresses, emails, social media profiles, and images.

When I tried Social Catfish, I found it pretty advanced compared to other tools. However, I do wish it supported WebP and had a quicker processing time.

Overall, it is a good facial recognition search engine for checking if someone has stolen your identity. Just remember to upload a good image quality file to get better accuracy.

Lenso.ai is a platform specializing in reverse image search. With the advanced AI technology implemented on lenso.ai, you can easily start a face search or look for people, places, duplicates, and related or similar images.

Lenso.ai face search functionality allows users to upload images and effectively find similar faces across a vast index. By analyzing key facial features, lenso.ai can match faces with remarkable precision, even in images with varying angles, lighting conditions, and resolutions. The intuitive interface of lenso.ai ensures that both tech-savvy users and novices can navigate the tool with ease.

I tried Lenso AI and found it easy to use with quick results. I liked the filter feature to refine searches. However, it often struggles with face recognition, shows older images, and offers limited results from social media.

If you’re okay with these limitations, it’s a good tool for quick searches, though it may not always be very accurate.

PimEyes is a reverse image search tool that uses advanced facial recognition to locate your photos across billions of public websites, like news articles, blogs, and forums. It excludes content behind paywalls or login restrictions.

PimEyes identifies images even if you’ve changed your appearance or are in a crowd. It offers an Opt-Out feature to prevent your photos from appearing in future searches and can send alerts when new images are detected online. Additionally, it helps protect your privacy by drafting and sending up to 80 DMCA and GDPR takedown notices.

When I tried PimEyes, I could focus on a specific face even in group photos, and the auto-focus feature saved a lot of time.

But, PimEyes currently searches public websites but not social media. Adding social media would improve image searches, as it contains many personal photos.

FaceCheck.id is a facial recognition tool that helps you find people online by pulling results from several online sources. It even includes mugshots in the results. Its database contains over 700 million faces so far. Furthermore, you get a link to the people’s social media profiles to help with further verification.

FaceCheck.id returns a score from 50 to 100 when the AI completes its scan. This tells you how closely the results match based on the similarities between the faces it has analyzed. The higher the score, the more similar it is. A score of 50-69 is a weak match, while a score of 90-100 is a certain match.

When I tried Facecheck.Id, it worked well for popular faces with accurate results and an easy-to-use interface. I liked the feature that ranks images by accuracy. However, it struggles with less popular faces.

It can be a great tool to use for identity verification checks when chatting with people online. It can help you determine if the person you’re talking to is who they say they are, so you don’t get catfished.

Betaface bills itself as a face recognition software vendor. It provides an SDK (Software Development Kit) that enables developers to create apps that detect and analyze faces in images and videos.

It also offers an API (Application Programming Interface) for integrating these facial recognition capabilities into apps and websites.

On top of facial recognition, its features include biometric measurements for analyzing and describing facial features. This makes Betaface ideal for security and access control applications where surveillance and identification are important.

It can even determine things like a person’s age, gender, skin color, ethnicity, clothing, and hairstyle shape by analyzing images or videos.  Its algorithm can even analyze a person’s facial expression to determine their emotions. All this is demographic information that can help with marketing and KYC policies.

I tried Betaface, and it was a bit confusing to use. It seems better suited for API users who can take advantage of its features. While it provides detailed information about faces, this isn’t very useful for regular users unless you’re working with group photos to find specific faces.

The demo version struggles with accuracy. Overall, it’s not the most reliable tool unless you’re using it for specific API needs.

TinEye is one of the best reverse image search tools, with over 68 billion indexed images. So, if you’re wondering if a particular image has been posted online, TinEye can help you find it.

TinEye uses facial recognition technology to look for exact matches in other images. It doesn’t rely on the metadata but the content of the image itself. That means it’s capable of finding face matches, even if the image has been edited in some way before publishing.

If you don’t find the image you’re looking for, you can always check later. The website claims it adds hundreds of millions of results each month.

Searching individual images is free, but you can sign up for the paid plan to set up image alerts that can track thousands of images online. This can help you find out where all your photos and images are used online and for what purpose.

It also has a handy browser for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera that you can install for easy access and searching.

Image Raider is used to identify copyright infringement. The tool takes the image you upload and finds matches online, along with other information that can help you build a case against the person who published it.

If Image Raider can’t find an exact match, it will look for similar results. It will show you the closest matches first, so you don’t waste time sifting through irrelevant results.

Individuals like photographers can get the most use of this tool since it can find people using their photos without permission. Image Raider can also be integrated into a law firm’s case management system to simplify the process of creating and managing cases. For example, a photographer’s photos can be automatically uploaded from physical drives or cloud storage solutions to find new infringement cases.

Yandex Images is a Russian search engine with a powerful built-in reverse image search tool that scans billions of indexed web pages.

Even though it searches the entire web, it’s perfect for anyone looking for high-resolution images trending in the Russian market. That’s because Yandex indexes a vast array of content from Russian websites that Google and Bing might not.

Yandex’s reverse image search mechanism is adept at recognizing things like faces and objects within an image. Thanks to computer vision, an AI-powered technology that uses machine learning and neural networks to help programs understand the content and context of visual data in a human-like fashion.

So, even if the image has been altered in major ways, Yandex’s computer vision can compare it with billions of results to find what you need.

Bing Images is a feature of Bing Search that helps you search for and find various images on the open web. You can search with images instead of search queries and keywords, allowing you to discover related content (some results can even be exact matches).

During a picture search, Bing Images will scan the web and display similar photos in the results. It even shows you related searches to help you discover more content and explore ideas further.

Bing pulls its results from a broad database of indexed images from the web. It can easily identify certain individuals, making it useful when you want to search for celebrities, public figures, and other famous people.

Google Images is a feature of Google Search that allows users to find images, such as pictures, illustrations, infographics, and animated GIFs, on publically available websites through reverse image lookup.

At its core, Google Images is a great tool for discovering content and similar images online. For instance, it can help you find a dress or piece of jewelry that a celebrity wore. If it cannot find an exact match, it will at least give you similar or related items.

When it comes to face searches, the results are limited. This is mostly likely due to Google’s strict privacy policies that protect people’s personal information. Like Bing Images, it wasn’t developed to have advanced facial recognition features.

The reverse image lookup can help you find people if their pictures are available on the open web. You can easily use it to identify a celebrity or your picture if it has been published on a public website.

Face++ is an API that provides tools for developers to integrate robust facial recognition features into their apps and programs. The AI that powers its facial recognition engine has been shown millions of faces to help it learn how to extract facial features from images accurately.

This makes Face++ the perfect tool for features like identity verification for access control, unlocking devices, fraud prevention, and automatically tagging photos.

It can also use face attribute analysis to determine a person’s age, gender, and emotional state. These insights can help develop apps that offer personalized experiences.

Furthermore, its facial landmark detection offers exciting opportunities for augmented reality.

For example, by tracking facial landmarks, developers can build apps that overlay digital content, such as filters and virtual makeup, onto people’s facial expressions.

Search4Faces is a facial recognition search engine that has over one billion images indexed from sources such as websites, social media, and online public records. It’s focused on helping you find profile photos and avatars.

Currently, it has four databases: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, TikTok, and Clubhouse. Search4Faces allows you to search each database individually to find the profile pictures and avatars you want.

You can even apply filters to narrow the search to a specific gender, age range, country, and city. And if you don’t find the result you’re looking for in one database, you can try another until you find it.

Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that identifies people by matching their photos with a massive database of images gathered from the internet. The company collects billions of photos from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube without user consent. These images are converted into biometric codes for accurate identification.

Law enforcement agencies upload a photo of an unknown person to Clearview. The system then checks the photo against its database to find matches. Clearview AI stands out because of its large database, high accuracy, and ability to identify faces quickly, even in low-quality images or at different angles.

Clearview AI played a significant role in Ukraine during the war with Russia, helping reunite refugees, identify Russian operatives, and counter misinformation.

However, the company has faced legal challenges. Recently, Clearview was fined €30.5 million by the Netherlands for violating privacy laws by collecting images without permission. It was also fined €5.2 million by the French SA.