How FaceSearch works

The pipeline, step by step

1. 1

   You add a photo

   A JPEG, PNG or WEBP with one face in it, dropped on the search page or in the app. Large images are downscaled in your browser before upload, so a 12-megapixel phone photo does not need to travel in full.

2. 2

   Metadata is stripped and the image re-encoded

   Before anything looks at the face, the file's embedded metadata (camera, time, GPS location) is removed and the image is re-encoded. The search never sees where or when the photo was taken.

3. 3

   The face is found

   The engine locates the face in the frame. One clear, front-facing face gives it the most to work with; the photo tips page explains what helps and what hurts.

4. 4

   The face becomes a description

   The face is converted into a compact set of numbers that summarise its geometry and texture. This description is what gets compared. It is not an image and it cannot be turned back into your photo.

5. 5

   Descriptions are compared and ranked

   Your face's description is measured against the descriptions of faces found on publicly accessible web pages. The closest come first. A normal search covers the core set of sources; a deep search covers more and takes longer.

6. 6

   You see pages, with their sources

   Each result shows the matched image and links to the public page it came from. On the Free plan the top results are visible and the links are locked; paid plans unlock every link. Signed in, the scan is saved to your history.

What a face description is

People often picture a face search as the engine flipping through photos and eyeballing each one. It does not work that way. Every face, yours and the ones found on public pages, is reduced to a list of numbers that captures the relationships between features: the spacing of the eyes, the shape of the jaw, the texture of the skin, hundreds of such measurements compressed together. Two faces are "close" when their lists are close. This is why a search is fast, why it can match a face across different photos, lighting and ages, and also why it sometimes matches a stranger who happens to measure alike; see the doppelgänger effect.

Normal search vs deep search

What is stored, and for how long

• Your uploaded photo is used to run the search. Its metadata is stripped first. It is never sold, never shared with other users, and never used to build a face database of the people who search.
• Your saved scan, when you are signed in: the search and its results, so you can reopen them without searching again. Delete any scan from your history whenever you like.
• Your account data: email, plan, credits and billing records needed to run the service. Export it from your account, or delete the account and everything attached to it. The delete your account page lists what is kept for legal and fraud-prevention reasons.
• Nothing about you is added to the index. The index is built from faces on public web pages. Searching does not put your face in it.

Where the faces in the index come from

From publicly accessible web pages: pages anyone can open without logging in. Private profiles, stories, direct messages, private albums and anything behind a login are not fetched and not indexed. That is a hard boundary, not a setting. It also means that if a photo of you exists only inside a private account, FaceSearch will not find it, and neither will any other face search engine that respects the same boundary.

Why results change over time

The web moves. Pages are published, edited and deleted every day, and the index follows. A search run next month can return pages that did not exist today and lose pages that have since been taken down. A result whose link no longer opens usually means the page changed after it was indexed; reading your results explains how to handle that. For anyone keeping an eye on their footprint, a periodic self-search is the practical approach, since FaceSearch does not offer alerts.

Why some searches take longer

A deep search compares your face against far more pages, so it takes longer by design. A normal search can also take a moment longer when the service is busy or when the photo needs more work to find the face in it. The scanner shows progress while it runs, and a saved scan lets you come back to a finished result rather than wait on the page.

Privacy, in one place

The short version is above; the full version is on privacy by design, which covers retention, export, deletion and who can see your results (only you), and in the privacy policy, which is the legal text. If you would rather not appear in results at all, the remove my photos page explains the free opt-out.