User question
Hello.
Lost contact with one person, but would love to find it. I know his name, there are a couple of photos, I know the city in which he lives. Is it possible to somehow look for it in the social. networks by photo (there are several thousand people by name - I won't go through all of them in a year)?
Good day!
Fortunately or not, but modern computer technology allows you to find a lot of information about a person, even from his photograph (and, by the way, the better the quality of the original photo, the better the search result).
In this article I will give several services that should help you in solving this issue ...
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Ways to find a person by photo
What you need: preferably not a blurry and clear face photo. An ideal photo for searching is an unprocessed photo in various editors; it's good if the person from her looks directly at you. It is desirable that the quality of the photo be high (so there are more chances).
As an example, I took a purely random photo of one girl (all coincidences are also random!).
Random girl face
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Method number 1: Find Face service - find a profile in VK by photo
Find Face home page - //findface.ru/
Note!
1) Unfortunately, since September 1, 2018, the service no longer works with individuals 
... If someone knows its analogues, please let me know in the comments to the article.
2) On April 1, 2019, the Find Clone service was opened, somewhat reminiscent of Find Face (more about it below).
A revolutionary new service that allows you to search for a person by photograph in the social network Vkontakte. To start searching, you must have a VK account. Now I will show you a search option using an example, and just below I will note the most important features of this service.
And so, going to the main page of the Find Face site, put the "I agree with the terms ..." checkbox, and click the "Find the same" button.
Find Face main page
Next, the service will offer you to upload a photo of the person you are looking for (see the screenshot below).
Uploading a photo of the person we are looking for
After that, you will be presented with the search results. There may be quite a lot of similar people: to filter out, use a filter that allows you to set a certain age of a person and his city of residence.
List of found girls, similar to the uploaded photo
On my own I will add some features of the service:
- can any person be found? Not! Firstly, not everyone has a VK profile; secondly, not everyone has photos there that are uploaded to the public; thirdly, you can search, but the service finds 85-90% of people, for some reason the rest are not searched (even if they have a photo loaded - apparently the service does not have time to index all the necessary data) ...
- Find Face has a mobile app - i.e. searching is not necessary on a PC;
- the first 30 searches are free - further, the service wants to receive a small reward from you;
- the service works well with photos taken in ideal conditions (when the person posed for you). With photos of people that you took yourself (for example, took them on the street), the service works much worse, the search results are noticeably weaker;
- if the service informs you that there are no people in the photo, just try to cut and enlarge the desired face in the photo (using some editor - Photoshop or even Paint is enough). Then download it again, and see the search result - it should be an order of magnitude better ...
In general, a very, very interesting service that makes you think. Imagine, after all, that time will come (and very soon it will come!) - when by one photo it will be possible to recognize almost the whole life of a person: where he is, what he does, etc. In general, you probably shouldn't upload all your photos to the network if you don't want someone to see them later (or find 
)...
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Method 2: using the Find Clone service
Website: //findclone.ru/
The service is similar to the previous one, designed to search for people by photo in social. Vkontakte networks (for example, with its help you can find people similar to you, clones). And the base of this site is quite large - millions of profiles and photos have already been analyzed by the neural network of the service!
Only 30 requests can be made for free (however, this will be enough for many). The interface is very simple, after registration you can immediately upload your photo for search (see example below).
Note: registration takes place using a mobile phone number.
Uploading a photo of the person you want to find
By the way, in the search results you will see not only profiles where exactly the same person is found in the photo that you uploaded for search, but also people similar to him (pay attention to the subsections "Clones" and "Doubles").
Please note that the service finds not only an exact match in the photo, but also similar faces
In general, the service leaves the most positive impressions of its work. I recommend to meet you!
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Method number 3: using search engines (Yandex, Google, etc.)
Modern search engines can search not only for text queries (like "download such and such a program"), but also search for pictures or photos similar to those that you specify. Moreover, they are looking very well. And I'm pretty sure that with the development of search technologies, search results will only get better!
By the way, compared to the previous service, search engines have their advantages:
- they can search in any social media. networks and on any sites (i.e. you are not limited to only one VK);
- You can search not only for photos with people's faces, but also for any pictures and photographs (for example, you can find a similar flower that grew in your country house and find out its name).
And so, I will show using Yandex as an example how to search by a picture.
1) We first go to the picture search page - //yandex.ru/images/
2) Then click on the icon with the camera, and load the picture or photo with the desired face.
Yandex search by image
3) Next, Yandex will try to determine what is shown in the photo, show similar photos, and also indicate the pages on the Internet where similar pictures (and similar ones) are located.
In general, having rummaged well in the results, you can find a lot of interesting things ...
Similar pictures, and sites where this picture is found
If the search results are unsuccessful, try another search engine. You can also wait for some time (a week or two) and try to search again (note: just search engines are constantly looking for and crawling new pages on the web and every day they update their index. There is a chance that after a while - the search results will be more informative!) .
Important!
On my blog there is an instruction on how to search for images in Yandex and Google. If you are still unclear, or you are interested in this topic, I recommend: //ocomp.info/poisk-po-kartinke-v-google-i-ya.html
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Method number 4: service looking for you / wait for me
Well, since such a topic, I cannot but recommend the service and the TV show of the same name "Wait for Me". If you can't find a person on your own, try this service too. Its main page is here: //poisk.vid.ru/
Wait for Me - the main page of the site
On the site you can see who is already looking for, as well as add a person to the search yourself. And, by the way, the more detailed you describe everything you know about a person, the more chances you have for a successful search (uploading a photo is highly desirable).
In general, you can learn how to use the site "Wait for Me" from one of my articles: //ocomp.info/kto-tebya-ishhet-v-zhdi-menya.html
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As an add-on!
If you are interested in the topic of finding people, you may be interested to know where your grandfather fought, what awards he had, and other information about him.
To start searching for this data, you just need to know the name of your grandfather (you can start the search in 10 seconds, free of charge, and without any SMS). See article: //ocomp.info/kak-uznat-gde-voeval-moy-ded.html
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That's all. Don't get lost
Good luck!
