How to do a Google reverse image search
You have a photo and want to know where it came from. Google does this for free, on desktop and on your phone. Here is exactly how, and the point at which it runs out of road.
6 min read
On a computer
Google reshuffles its interface often, but the entry point has stayed in the same place for years.
- Go to images.google.com.
- Click the camera icon in the search box.
- Drag a photo in, pick a file, or paste the image's address.
- Shortcut: you can drag the photo straight onto the search box without touching the camera icon.
- For an image already on a page: right-click it and choose "Search image with Google".
On a phone
On mobile this now runs largely through Google Lens.
- Open the Google app and tap the Lens icon in the search bar.
- Pick a photo from your gallery, or point the camera at something.
- In Chrome, press and hold an image and choose "Search image with Google".
- On iPhone, sharing a photo from the Photos app to the Google app gets you to the same place.
How to read the results
Google shows three kinds of result: pages containing the same image, other sizes of it, and visually similar content.
The first is usually the one you want — the list of pages carrying that image. If the photo was lifted from a stock site, a news story or someone else's account, it often shows up here and your search ends.
Visually similar tends to find the same composition rather than the same person. Feed it a red car and it returns other red cars.
Where it stops working
Google reverse image search looks for the file, not the face. That means it returns nothing when:
- The photo has been cropped, rotated or filtered.
- You are looking for a completely different shot of the same person.
- The image was re-saved as a screenshot — recompression changes the file.
- The image only exists behind a login, where Google cannot reach.
What to do when it finds nothing
Try Yandex next. Its image search is noticeably better at facial similarity and often catches what Google misses. Bing Visual Search and TinEye are two more free angles.
If all of them come back empty and what you are looking for is a person, face search is what remains: because it searches facial geometry rather than the file, it can find a different photo of the same person.
Common questions
- Is Google reverse image search free?
- Yes, completely, and you do not need an account.
- Does Google keep the photo I upload?
- Google processes the image to run the search. Per its own documentation, images uploaded for reverse search are not shown in search results, though they may be retained for a period to improve the service. Factor that in if the photo is sensitive.
- Why can't it find my photo?
- Reverse image search matches the same file. Cropping, filtering, re-saving, or a different shot of the same person all reduce it to nothing. That is where face search is needed.
- Is Google Lens the same as reverse image search?
- Google has largely merged the two. Lens also tries to recognise what is in the image, while classic reverse search focuses on finding copies of the same file. In practice the same entry point gets you to both.
If Google and Yandex came back empty, you can search for other pages carrying the same face.