Face Search Engines in 2026: PimEyes, FaceCheck.ID, Lenso and 6 More Compared

What a face search engine actually does#

A regular reverse image search, like TinEye, looks for the same picture, even cropped or recolored. TinEye says in its own help pages that it "does not recognize faces". A face search engine does something different: it turns the face in your photo into a numeric fingerprint and compares it with fingerprints of faces it has collected from the web. That means it can return a different photo of the same person. That makes it useful for catching a catfish and finding your own pictures, and also why it is controversial: in the wrong hands it identifies strangers.

None of these engines confirm identity. FaceCheck's own FAQ is blunt about it: a computer "can't establish a guaranteed identity match" from internet photos, and lookalikes are common. Treat every match as a lead to check, not an answer.

The engines compared#

Pick by job#

Find where your own photos are posted: PimEyes#

PimEyes is the engine built around the person in the photo. Its plans run $29.99 a month (Open Plus, 75 searches a day), $34.99 (PROtect, 125 searches, 200 takedowns, 20 alerts) and $299.99 (Advanced, unlimited searches, 500 alerts). PROtect is the one that matters if you want photos removed: it adds takedown requests to the sites hosting them. Free searches show that matches exist but hide where they are.

Two limits to know. PimEyes says it does not index social media, so a photo that only lives on Instagram will not show up. And it deletes uploaded search photos within 48 hours, by its own account. To remove yourself, PimEyes has a free opt-out form: you upload a photo of your face and an anonymized scan of an ID, one form per photo.

Check a dating or marketplace profile: FaceCheck.ID#

FaceCheck.ID is built for the opposite question: who is this person, and are they who they say? Its standout feature is red flags. When a face matches photos on scam-report sites, sex-offender registries, mugshot pages or many social profiles under different names, it warns you above the results, and it flags faces it thinks are AI-generated. Each match carries a 0 to 100 score. FaceCheck says 83 or more is a reliable match, but only from a clear, unobstructed photo.

Price is the catch. FaceCheck sells credits only for crypto (Bitcoin, Litecoin or Solana), and a search costs 3 credits. That works out to about $0.38 a search on the $19 pack (150 credits, expires in 14 days) and about $0.18 on the $597 pack (10,000 credits, a year). It does not accept cards; its FAQ suggests buying crypto through an exchange or PayPal first. It bans searching for children, and removing your own photos is free: a selfie check removes them instantly in most cases.

If you are checking a match for romance or marketplace fraud, a people-search service such as Social Catfish adds names, phone numbers and records to an image search. It costs more, and it is a different kind of tool.

Research, alerts and an API: Lenso.ai#

Lenso.ai splits results into categories (People, Duplicates, Places, Related, Similar) and is the most open about pricing for developers. Its plans are $19.99 a month for 50 source unlocks and 10 alerts, $69.99 for 500 unlocks, 50 alerts, a deeper Research Mode and a DMCA helper that drafts takedown emails, and $2,800 a month for the Developer plan with 5,000 API requests. For a developer that is roughly $0.56 a request, which is the number to beat if you are thinking of building on face search. Our developer guide to face recognition APIs compares it with Rekognition, Azure Face and the open-source libraries.

The cheapest monthly plan: FaceSeek#

FaceSeek gives every account 2 free credits (top 2 results only), then $20 a month for 25 searches a day plus 15 Deep Search credits, or $50 a month for unlimited normal searches, 50 Deep Search credits and takedown requests. Deep Search is its claim to coverage beyond the indexed web: forums, archives and other unindexed sources, on a separate credit pool.

Free: FaceOnLive, and the two FaceSeeks#

FaceOnLive markets itself as a free, unlimited, no-sign-up alternative to PimEyes and FaceCheck. Its own search page says what happens next: results "open on FaceSeek in a new tab". That FaceSeek is faceseek.online, which is not the FaceSeek at faceseek.cc covered above: faceseek.cc says it is a product of Humanity Founders, Inc., and the two sites have different pricing and policies. faceseek.online's own pricing page charges $1.99 for a first full search, then token packs from $9.90. Two engines sharing one name is a good reason to check the address bar before you upload, because the privacy terms that apply to your photo are whichever site actually receives it.

Russian social networks: Search4faces#

Search4faces is the only engine here that searches social networks directly, and it lists its own databases: about 1.1 billion VK profile photos collected November 2019 to November 2020, about 313 million VK and Odnoklassniki avatars from 2022 and 2024, 125 million TikTok avatars from 2021 and 13 million Clubhouse avatars. The numbers are on its homepage, with success rates between about 10% and 69% depending on the database. The data is years old, and it is mostly useful for people active on Russian-language networks.

Free general search: Yandex Images and Google Lens#

Yandex Images was for years the free tool people used to match faces, and it is still how many people look: "yandex image search" shows up 74,000 times a month in US searches. We did not test how well it matches faces today, so treat it as a free first pass. Google Lens is built to find copies of a picture and the objects in it, not to tell you who someone is: when a photo shows a person, Lens answers that "results for people are limited".

What Stork's own search data shows#

People look for these tools by name. Over the last 90 days, Stork's pages appeared in Google for 2,387 distinct searches about face search, 180,460 times, and FaceCheck.ID's page was the most-clicked page on the whole site in the last 28 days. Many of those searches are misspellings of the brand ("facecheck.ld", "facechek", "face check.id"), which says most people already know which engine they want. In US search volume, "pimeyes" is searched about 246,000 times a month, roughly six times "facecheck id" (40,500) and seven times "lenso ai" (33,100).

Is it legal?#

Using a face search engine to find your own photos or to check a profile someone sent you is legal in most places. Building one is where the law bites, and that tells you something about the risk of the tools themselves:

• EU: the AI Act bans AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV (Article 5(1)(e)), in force since February 2, 2025.
• Netherlands: the Dutch data protection authority fined Clearview AI €30.5 million in 2024 for building an illegal database of billions of faces, and warned that Dutch organizations using Clearview break the law too.
• Illinois (BIPA): a US judge approved a settlement in March 2025 giving class members a 23% stake in Clearview instead of cash, over biometric data collected without consent.

Clearview AI sells to law enforcement, not to the public, so it is not in our comparison. For every ruling and fine so far, see our guide to face recognition laws in 2026. The consumer engines above all describe themselves as searching publicly available pages. PimEyes, FaceCheck.ID, Lenso.ai and FaceSeek each publish a way to remove yourself; Search4faces does not state one on its homepage.

Use it responsibly#

• Search your own face, or a profile that contacted you. Do not search strangers you photographed in public.
• Never search children. FaceCheck bans it outright.
• A high score is a lead, not proof. Confirm with a second source before you accuse anyone of anything.
• Read the engine's terms before uploading. Your photo goes to a third party, and with FaceOnLive that third party is faceseek.online.

How to remove your face#

Opt-outs are engine by engine, and none of them removes the photo from the website that hosts it. Our step-by-step opt-out guide walks through each one. PimEyes uses a form with a face photo and an anonymized ID. FaceCheck removes photos after a selfie check, free and usually instant. Lenso.ai has an opt-out form that removes every image of the face you upload. FaceSeek deletes your account and uploads on request. To take the photo itself down, contact the hosting site; PimEyes PROtect, Lenso's DMCA helper and FaceSeek Business draft those requests for you.