Do you know that you can find a Facebook profile with just a picture? Yes, you can with the “Facebook Image Search” software. In this article, we’ll be talking about Facebook Image Search and how to find a Facebook profile from a picture.
Facebook is one of the leading social media company in the world. With millions of photos uploaded daily on their website, it will be locating a profile. That is why they have come up with this software.
What is Facebook Image Search?
Facebook Image Search is a software used to search for a profile on the website. You’ll need to upload the photo of the profile you want to search, the software then uses the identification number assigned to the photo to search for it. It is similar but quite different from the “Reverse Image Search” from Google.
How to Find Facebook Profile from a Picture
Note that Facebook will not show you photos from accounts that have privacy settings. So if the photo’s account owner is on privacy settings, Facebook won’t show you their profile. The software can only show “public photos” which the owners want the general public to see. If the photo you have was taken from Facebook, then try the below steps;
- Right-click on the image you wish to search for on Facebook. This will open a list of options.
- Select “Open in New Tab”, if you’re using Google Chrome. For other browsers, select “View Photo”, “View Image”, or anything similar to that.
- In the new tab, go to the URL of that image/photo and locate the three sets of numbers, which is separated by an underscore. Or the file name of the photo depending on the browser you use. E.g fbid=737463636537e&set=a.12599254846537
- Take the middle set of numbers e.g 12599254846537. This is the photo ID you’ll use to find the photo on Facebook.
- Go to your browser and type this https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=***
- Replace “*” with the photo ID which 12599254846537
- So you should have something like this https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=12599254846537 in your browser’s address bar
- Now press “Enter”, this will take you directly to the photo on Facebook and you’ll see the profile that posted it.
How to Find Facebook Profile with Reverse Image Search on Google
You can also use the “Reverse Image Search” on Google to find a Facebook profile. Follow the steps below to do this;
- As usual, right-click the photo and select “Search Google for Image” from the list of available options.
- The new tab will display possible matches for the photo you have with you. Then you can now direct it towards Facebook.
- Remove the text you have on the search box, and enter “site:facebook.com”, then press Enter. It will show results from only Facebook featuring the profiles linked with the photo.
- Scroll through the profile result to see if anyone of them is who you’re looking for.
There are other websites that use this Reverse Image Search technique. TinEye is a popular one amongst them. Once you upload a photo to their database, it will show you everywhere on the internet that photo has appeared on, either Facebook or not. Bing search engine also has the “Reverse Image Search” software and works like the one on Google search engine.
Though search engine and Facebook uses different algorithms to search for an image or photo. The search engine will have to crawl and index the photo based on its “Alt text”. While for Facebook, it crawls Facebook account ID, privacy and display settings before delivering the result of an image search query.
