FaceSearch vs TinEye

Use TinEye when you have the exact picture and want every place it has been published, including cropped, resized and edited copies; it is free and precise. Use FaceSearch when you want other photos of the same person, which TinEye's own help centre says it cannot do.

At a glance

What TinEye does and says it does not do

TinEye builds a compact digital fingerprint of the picture you submit and compares it with fingerprints of images it has crawled. That finds the same picture even when it has been cropped, colour-adjusted, resized, heavily edited or slightly rotated. Its help centre answers the two questions that matter here directly: TinEye does not commonly return similar images, and it does not do facial recognition, so it cannot locate other photos of the same person. Results can be sorted by best match, most changed, biggest image, newest and oldest, which makes it the best free tool for tracing where a specific picture went and which copy came first.

FaceSearch starts from the face, not the file. It measures the face in your photo and looks for faces with similar measurements on public pages, so it finds the conference gallery, the old profile and the fake account that used different photos of you. It will also surface look-alikes, which TinEye never does because it is not looking at faces at all. The face search vs reverse image search explainer covers the difference in depth.

Where TinEye wins

• Tracing one picture. For "where has this exact photo been published", TinEye is precise, fast and free, and its sort options tell you which copy is oldest and which was altered most.
• Edited copies. Crops, filters, watermarks and resizes still match, which is exactly how stolen photos get reused.
• Everything is free on the website, with no account and source links always shown.
• Browser extensions that search any image on any page with a right click.
• Tools for image owners. TinEye Alerts monitors for new copies of your images, and MatchEngine lets businesses search their own collections. FaceSearch has no alerts and no API.
• Privacy posture. It says uploads are not added to its index, and it has no face index to be in.

Where FaceSearch wins

• Different photos of the same person. The whole category TinEye says it does not cover.
• Dating and impersonation checks. A catfish rarely reuses the exact picture you have; a face match survives a new crop or a different photo of the same stolen set. See the catfish check guide.
• Your own footprint. One current photo of you finds older public photos TinEye cannot connect to it. See find my photos online.
• Deep search and saved history, with take-down help on Business.
• Apps on iOS and Android; TinEye has none.

When to use which

Pricing and removal

TinEye is free for non-commercial use on its website. Its API is sold in prepaid bundles; the pricing post on its blog lists 5,000 searches for $200, 10,000 for $300, 50,000 for $1,000 and 1,000,000 for $10,000, and MatchEngine, its private-collection product, has tiers from $200 a month in a 2021 help article. TinEye Alerts is a paid subscription whose price was not on any page we could reach on November 6, 2026. FaceSearch is free for the first search and $5 for a Starter week with every link; see the pricing page. There is nothing to remove yourself from at TinEye because it does not index faces; at FaceSearch, removal is free by email, see remove my photos.