Finding a person via the Internet is quite simple - now almost everyone has their own page on social networks. You just need to somehow reach it.
There are several ways to do this (I talked about them), but they all rely on searching for information. You must indicate your first name, last name, age, city of residence and other information. But even if you know everything about a person, down to his blood type, this is not a guarantee that he will be found.
It’s a completely different matter if you have a photograph, even a general one. Now there are services that can recognize faces and search for the pages of their owners.
Preparing the photo
First you need to crop the photo. Thus, we will reduce its computer size (usually it is large) and remove all unnecessary things. This is especially true if the photo is a group one.
1 . Open Start - All Programs - Accessories - Paint
2. Open the photo in this program (you can simply drag it inside the window).
3. Select the “Select” tool at the top and circle the desired person.
4 . Click the “Crop” button.
Search on VKontakte (findface.ru)
FindFace (findface.ru) is a special service for searching for people on the VKontakte social network. But to use it, you need to have a VK page.
You can get it for free in just a minute - to do this, go to the website vk.com and register.
To search through FindFace, follow the link and click on the “find identical” button.
The service will ask you to allow access to your VK page, to which we agree.
Upload the desired photo (you can simply drag it inside the window).
And we wait for the end of the search procedure.
That's all - all that remains is to find your lost one in the list :)
Search the entire Internet
Search by image. There are two special services for this: one from Google (images.google.com), the other from Yandex (images.yandex.ru). They are very easy to use: you just need to drag the photo into the search bar.
Google Image Search
Search by image Yandex
The result will appear immediately. First, the same picture will be shown, but in other sizes (if available on the Internet), a little lower - similar photographs, and even lower - the Internet pages on which they are posted.
TinEye (tineye.com). Popular foreign image search service.
Everything is exactly the same here: drag a picture from your computer into the search bar, and immediately get the result.
Browser extensions
Extensions or add-ons are small gadgets that are added to an Internet program and perform certain tasks in it. For example, there are extensions for downloading videos from Youtube or music from Contact. There are also such programs for searching by photos.
Almost every browser has its own collection of various add-ons. But most of them are in Google Chrome. In other programs, there are literally one or two extensions for our purposes, and even then they do not work quite as they should. Therefore, I will show how to work with add-ons only using the example of Chrome.
Where to find and how to install the extension
1 . Click on the button at the top right and select Additional tools - Extensions.
2. We go down to the very bottom of the page (scroll with the wheel on the mouse) and click on “More extensions”.
3. Type keywords in the top search bar and press Enter. The found extensions and applications appear. Install what you need (you can delete it later at any time).
If you install an application, it is added to an empty tab, in the Services item. That is, to find it later, you need to open a new browser tab and go to “Services” (top left).
Extensions are installed a little differently - they are added immediately after the address bar.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Open the photo posted by him personally. Since information is only visible here about the place where it was taken, it is better to choose home photos;
- See if it is geotagged. They are indicated under the “Like” button.
If the address is indicated on a recent photograph, and the place on it is located in the city where you live, consider yourself lucky. It is easy to find a person using these coordinates. In the same way, look at the location on photos in albums and on avatars.
If you don't want to be found in the same way, turn off location display in the page settings. Also remove any marks you have already made on the uploaded photos.
This won’t take much time, since you can delete a geotag in just three clicks:
The new setting will be saved automatically.
Alternative Methods
If there are no marks on the VKontakte photo, social engineering will come to the rescue. To find a user, you should carefully study his page, friends and subscriptions - some of this will one way or another indicate the user’s location.
First of all, look at where the person comes from. The current place of residence is sometimes not indicated, but the city of birth, which is listed in the detailed information about the page, most likely is. Check to see if the person still lives there.
It also contains information about the school, job or university where the user is studying. Knowing this data, determining the location of a person will not be difficult.
Then you should carefully look at his friends. The easiest way to determine your place of residence is by relatives and school friends.
If they are not there, open all the pages in turn - whichever city you see most often is where the user you are studying usually lives. Next, go to the menu of his subscriptions. Quite often you can find that a person is a member of a group in the city in which he lives - this could be a news public or a community in the “Overheard” format.
This method is very reliable and convenient, since it is possible to identify a person sitting in such a group, even if his page information and friends list are hidden.
It is not recommended to use applications and programs that supposedly identify people by IP address - this is 100% likely to be a scam, since this is simply impossible. The address itself is obtained using a sniffer - a traffic analyzer, usually built into fraudulent sites.
Any modern digital camera records additional information about the photo in the photo file - EXIF data: the model of the camera that took the photo, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, ISO sensitivity, time and date of shooting, etc.
When you upload a photo to Yandex.Photos, this information is saved. To open it, on the photo viewing page, click the More icon and select Show EXIF.
Why don't some photos have EXIF?
If a photo is taken with a film camera and then scanned, it cannot have EXIF data because it is assigned to the photo when the file is created by a digital camera.
Graphic editors (for example, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom), with certain file saving settings, can delete EXIF data.
Also, some mobile phones do not leave EXIF data.
How can I find out the model of the camera that took the photo and see other photos taken with this camera?
On the photo viewing page, tap the More icon.
Select Show EXIF.
You will be taken to a page with photographs of other authors whose works were taken by this camera model and posted on Yandex.Photos.
How to find out where a photo was taken?
Each photo on Yandex.Photos can be linked to a map. If the photo is already linked to a map, to find out its location, click the On map link, which is located on the photo viewing page.
If the photo is not linked to the map, but you know where it was taken, you can offer the author of the photo your option for placement on the map. To do this, click the link Link to map under the photo.
You will be taken to a map page where you can enter the location of the photo. If the author agrees with your proposal, you will receive a message by mail.
From time to time, users need to search by photo. Such situations most often occur when you need to find out the original source of a particular photograph.
For example, if a person has a frame from a film, but he does not know the title, then from this frame you can find out what kind of film it is. In this case, it is simply impossible to enter a query in words, since it is not clear what needs to be entered.
Besides, sometimes you want to know who took a photo. For such cases, there are very easy-to-use services. Let's look at the most popular ones and how to use them. Before doing this, it would be useful to understand how image search works in general.
Image search algorithm
Everything in this case is based on the fact that when any image is uploaded to the Internet, the process of adding certain attributes to this photo occurs. Any content manager or SEO optimization specialist will understand what the Alt, Title and Description attribute are.
So, any image that is located on the World Wide Web has all this. If these attributes are not specified by the person who uploaded the picture, they are generated automatically. Actually, they are used to search for images on the Internet.
Everything is taken into account - the title, the description, and in general all the information that is available for a given image. Now let's return to the description of search services.
Service No. 1. Google Images
Yes, the world's largest search engine, of course, also includes a service for searching information from photographs. The search scheme itself is exactly the same as in a regular search engine that searches using standard test queries.
As practice shows, Google works much better than other search engines in this regard. Actually, this is the reason for its enormous popularity.
Google's photo search service also performs very well - all possible links to the entered pictures and information about them are found.
To find some information about a photo in Google Images, you need to do the following:
Go to www.google.com/imghp. This is the address of Google's image search engine.
Enter the desired image into it.
You can do this in one of four ways:
Copy from another resource on the Internet or from an image viewer. This is done by right-clicking on the desired image, if this happens in a browser, and selecting “Copy...” or selecting the image, for example, in Paint and pressing the Ctrl + C key combination. Then all you have to do is press Ctrl+V on the search engine page.
No. 1. Copy Image button in browser
Select a file on your computer. To do this, click on the “Search by picture” button, go to the “Upload file” tab, click on the “Select file” button, in the window that opens, select where the desired picture is located and start the search.
No. 2. Search by uploaded photo in Google Images
Provide a link to the photo. To do this, right-click on the photo you like in your browser and select “Copy address...”. After this, you should go to Google Images, click on the “Search by image” button, click on the “Specify link” tab, enter the previously copied link in the appropriate field and click on the “Search by image” button.
No. 3. Search by image link in Google Images
Just drag the image file from a folder on your computer to any area of the Google Images website. This method is described on the service itself and is the main one for working with it. In addition, it is the simplest among all on this list.
3. Press the Enter button on the keyboard if the search has not yet started automatically.
As a result, the user will see the size of the image, information about whether there are the same pictures on the Internet, only of a different size, and links to sites where the same or similar photographs are available. The user will also see a query that most likely can be used to find this picture. In addition, in the “Similar Images” section, pictures that are similar in meaning will be shown. An example of search results can be seen in Figure 4.
No. 4. Example of search results in Google Images
The Yandex.Images address is yandex.ua/images/. The methods for entering a search image using an image using this service are exactly the same as Google, namely:
dragging a picture from a folder;
selecting a file by clicking the “Select file” button;
entering the image address on the Internet.
As soon as the user gets to the site, he will see a menu in front of him, indicated by number 1 in Figure No. 5. To access the three methods described above, on the main page of the site you need to click on the “Search by image” button (in Figure No. 5 it is highlighted with a green frame).
After this, a menu marked with the number 2 will appear. To use the first method, you just need to drag the desired file into the field highlighted with a red frame in the same figure. There is also the inscription “Select a file”, by clicking on which a standard selection dialog will appear, where you will need to specify the location of the desired image.
To enter an address, you need to copy it on another site (this is done, as before, by right-clicking on the picture and selecting “Save address...”) and enter it in the field shown in the blue frame.
No. 5. Methods for uploading an image to Yandex.Images
Yandex.Images has many advantages over a similar service from Google. So, you can search for a picture from your collection called “My Pictures”.
You can upload anything there. To do this, click on the button highlighted in Figure 6 with a green frame. You can also select search protection here. The fact is that in addition to the necessary materials, the search engine can often return materials of an erotic or violent nature.
It is better not to see all this for children and generally mentally healthy people. For such cases, there is a “Family Search” function, which can be selected by clicking on the protection button (highlighted in blue). There you can also remove protection altogether or choose something in between – “Moderate search”.
No. 6. Yandex.Images page
Here, the screensaver always features a photo of the day, which may also be of interest to the average user. In addition, there are buttons below, by clicking on which you can find other pictures with a similar theme and download desktop wallpaper with this photo.
An example of image search results in this service is shown in Figure 7.
No. 7. Search result via Yandex.Images
Service No. 3. TinYe
This service is the most popular for photo searches among developers and system administrators. The reason for this is that it is best at finding similar pictures and information about the entered image.
After all, Google and Yandex specialize in searching by text phrases, and their algorithm for searching by photo is somewhat less developed. But TinYe was initially positioned as a search engine for photos.
The website of this service looks like this: tineye.com. Its interface is somewhat unusual, but the methods for loading the original image for search remain exactly the same.
So, to select a file to search, you need to click on the button highlighted in Figure 8 with a red frame. After this, all that remains is to again indicate where the image is located.
In the field shown in the same figure with a green frame, you can enter the address of the picture, copying it in advance, or drag the picture directly into it. After this, you just have to click on the search button in the form of a magnifying glass if it does not start automatically.
No. 8. TinYe photo search service page
In the search results, the user will be able to see the number of sites that have an exact match of this image. Below you will see how many pictures were checked and how long this process took.
After this, the sites themselves with the desired image, as well as links to them, will be shown. An example of search results can be seen in Figure 9.
No. 9. Search results on tineye.com
Below you can clearly see how a photo search occurs using a service from Google.