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Searching Photos

Add photo folders, let SnapByFace index every face into 512-D embeddings, then review matches by person or by image with similarity scores, previews and media export.

Add photo folders

Add any folder of images; SnapByFace scans it recursively, including sub-folders. Supported formats: JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, WebP, HEIC/HEIF.

After the first analysis, only changed files are processed again: SnapByFace compares file size, modification time, a SHA-256 digest, and the index version, and skips everything unchanged. See Large Libraries.

How a photo match is decided

  1. The image is read and faces are detected with the bundled detector.
  2. Every detected face is encoded into a 512-D embedding.
  3. Each person’s reference embedding is compared against the indexed faces — FAISS vector search, or a NumPy search if FAISS is unavailable.
  4. A match is reported when the cosine similarity is at or above the threshold — 0.45 by default.

Read the results

The results view has two perspectives:

  • By person — a list of people; selecting one shows every media file they appear in.
  • By media — a list of photos and videos; selecting one shows the people matched in it.

Each hit shows a similarity percentage: how close the two embeddings are. It is not a probability, and it is not a certainty score a human would assign.

Double-click any result to open a full-size preview and confirm it by eye.

:::tip If correct matches are missing, lower the threshold. If strangers are being matched, raise it. A threshold change re-matches existing embeddings and does not re-analyze your photos — see Threshold Tuning. :::

Add, replace, or remove people

  • Adding a person after indexing is cheap — SnapByFace re-matches against embeddings it already computed, so no image is re-read.
  • Replacing a person’s reference photo updates their embedding; the media does not need to be re-analyzed.
  • Removing a person removes their matches from the view; you can re-add them at any time.

Export

  • Export matched media — copy the matching photos, and the full original video files behind video hits, into a folder you choose.

Exports are copies; your original files are never touched.

Trial limits

Without a license, the results view shows at most 5 matches per person and 20 matches per search, and you can start up to 100 analyses in total. Searching itself is not limited — activating unlocks the matches already found, with no need to re-run anything. See Activation.

Common questions

  • Why is a photo missing from the results? Its faces scored below the threshold, the face was too small or too dark to detect, or the reference photo is poor.
  • Why is the same photo listed twice? Two different faces in it matched two different people — expected for group photos.
  • Does the order of folders matter? No. Results are grouped by person and by media, not by source folder.

Next steps