FaceSearch vs Google Lens for faces

Use Google Lens first when you have the exact picture and want to know where it has been published; it is free and its index is the largest there is. Use FaceSearch when you want other photos of the same person, which Lens is built not to find.

At a glance

What Google Lens actually does with a face

Point Lens at a photo of a person and it returns pages that contain that same picture or very similar pictures: the same pose, the same background, the same crop. It also returns visually similar images that are not the same person at all, because it is matching shapes, colours and composition rather than facial features. Google has said publicly that Lens is designed not to identify people, and in practice it does not: upload a new photo of yourself and Lens will show you shirts and haircuts, not your other photos.

That design choice is the whole difference. Lens treats a face as part of an image. A face search engine treats the image as a container for a face, measures the face, and looks for the same measurements elsewhere. Our explainer on face search vs reverse image search goes deeper; the short version is that Lens finds reposts and FaceSearch finds reappearances.

Where Google Lens wins

• Finding copies of a known picture. If a scammer reposted your exact selfie, Lens will usually find it faster than any face engine, and for free.
• Index size. Google's index of the public web is the largest there is. No face engine, FaceSearch included, has crawled as many pages.
• Everything is free. Unlimited searches, source links always shown, no account.
• Convenience. It is in the Google app, in Chrome's right-click menu, on images.google.com and in Android's camera.
• Non-face problems. Products, landmarks, text, plants and the origin of a meme. FaceSearch does none of that.

Where FaceSearch wins

• Different photos of the same person. The dating profile that uses a stranger's holiday photos, the fake account using your old pictures under a new name, the conference gallery you forgot about. Lens finds none of these unless the exact picture was reused.
• Cropped, flipped and filtered copies. Scammers edit stolen photos to defeat image matching. A face match survives edits a file match does not.
• Deep search for a wider pass when a normal search finds little.
• Results built for the follow-up. Each match carries its source page and sits in your history so you can return to it, and the Business plan adds help with take-down requests.

When to use which

Removal: two different jobs

Removing your face from FaceSearch results is a request to us: email a photo of your face and we hide the matching results, free; see remove my photos. Google has no face index to remove you from, but it does offer a removal request for search results that expose personal information or intimate images, and that request is often the single most useful step after a face search finds something, because it is Google's results most people will see. The removal guide covers Google's forms, the source sites and StopNCII in order.