Facebook is the deepest photo archive of any platform here and the most locked down. Almost everything posted in the last decade is friends-only. What remains public — profile pictures, cover photos, business and community pages, and the enormous back catalogue of profiles set up before privacy defaults tightened — is still a very large amount of face.
Facebook's public surface is mostly profile pictures and pages. The photo albums people actually remember posting are almost always friends-only, and those are not searchable by anyone.
Your photo stays on your device until you press search, and only the square you framed is sent. Checking the photo is free — you'll see the plans before anything is searched or charged. By continuing you confirm you have a lawful reason to look this person up.
This is the platform that finds the profile somebody forgot they made. A dormant account from years ago, under a maiden name or an old nickname, still carrying a public profile picture — that's the classic Facebook hit, and it's often the one that connects two names to the same face. It's also why Facebook results are frequently the oldest photos in a report.
A public Facebook profile picture is usually a photo the person chose to represent themselves, which makes it a stronger signal than a random tagged shot. But be careful with age: a match against a fifteen-year-old profile photo tells you who someone was, not who they are, and people change more than a confidence score admits.
A surprising share of Facebook matches land on business or seller pages rather than personal profiles. That's useful. If the person selling you something has a face that also appears on three unrelated storefronts under three names, you have learned everything you needed to learn.
Only through whatever is still public — usually the profile picture, which Facebook keeps visible by default. If they've restricted even that, there is nothing to match against.
No. Facebook ran recognition inside its own platform on its own data and shut that down years ago. This searches public images from across the web, and has no access to anything inside Facebook's walls.
Because the public layer of Facebook skews old. Newer content is overwhelmingly friends-only, so what's left to index tends to be profile pictures and profiles set up under looser defaults.
One search covers all of them at once — the platform pages just explain what to expect from each. Start from a photo and you'll get matches from everywhere the face appears.
Facebook is a trademark of its owner. ARGUS is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to it, and searches only images that are already publicly accessible on the open web.