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Photo face search

Search Your Photos by Face

Point SnapByFace at your photo folders, give it one picture of the person you are looking for, and get every match ranked by similarity — without uploading a single image.

Download SnapByFace See how it works

What it is

What is photo face search?

Photo face search finds people in pictures without tags, albums or filenames. Instead of remembering where you filed someone, you show the app one clear photo of their face; it compares that face against every face in your library and returns the images where the person appears, ranked by similarity.

SnapByFace does this entirely on your own computer. Your photos are read locally, the faces are encoded into 512-dimension embeddings, and every match is a direct comparison — no approximate shortcuts that could silently miss someone.

How to get started

From folders to matches in three steps

1

Add one photo per person

Drop a clear reference photo into the People folder and name the file after the person — Alice.jpg becomes Alice. Sub-folders are fine.

2

Point it at your library

Select the folders where your photos live. SnapByFace reads JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, WebP and HEIC/HEIF, indexing faces as it goes.

3

Search, review, export

Results come ranked by similarity score with a tunable threshold (0.30–0.80). Select the matches you want and export them with original timestamps intact.

Built for large libraries

What that means for your photo collection

Tens of thousands of photos

SnapByFace is built for whole archives, not sample folders. Incremental scanning means adding new photos only processes the new files — the existing index is preserved.

Exact matching, not approximate

Every face in your library is compared against the one you are looking for. The trade-off is stated plainly: the larger the library, the longer a single search takes.

Pausable multi-hour scans

Indexing a big library for the first time can take a while. Pause it, close the app, and resume tomorrow — progress persists across sessions.

Nothing leaves your computer

The index and embeddings live in a local folder in your user directory. No upload, no cloud album, no account.

Photo face search: frequently asked questions

Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. SnapByFace reads your folders and stores what it learns on your own disk. The only outbound request is an optional, switchable statistics ping that carries no media data.
How many photos can it search?
It is designed for large local libraries — tens of thousands of images. Because matching is exact rather than approximate, search time grows with library size; indexing is incremental, so the one-off cost is paid once.
Which photo formats are supported?
JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, WebP and HEIC/HEIF, including iPhone HEIC exports. Camera RAW files (CR2, NEF, ARW and similar) are not supported — convert them to JPEG first.
How do I label people?
You don't, beyond naming a file. One reference photo per person; the file name becomes the person's name in results. No manual tagging pass required.

Search your own library today

Download SnapByFace and run a free trial search on a folder you already have. Everything runs offline from the first launch.

Download SnapByFace See how it works