Reverse image engine selection matrix

By engine

Entry: https://yandex.com/images/ — upload or paste an image URL.
Matching model: learned visual similarity with a strong face component.
Best at: faces; the same person in other photographs; street scenes and buildings in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Balkans, Iran and China; crops and rotations; screenshots of images.
Reading the results: the page separates sites where the image appears from similar images. Only the first block is provenance evidence. Yandex also offers size variants of the matched image — use the largest to find the copy closest to source.
Weak at: consumer products, English-language commerce, very recent posts.
Failure mode: returns a confident wall of different people with the same haircut. It optimises for similarity, not identity.

Entry: https://lens.google.com/ — also reachable from the camera icon in Google Images, and by right-clicking an image in Chrome.
Matching model: object, entity, text and landmark recognition first; duplicate detection second.
Best at: identifying what a thing is — species, model, artwork, plant, book, uniform type, aircraft type; landmarks; reading and searching text in the frame; anything with a retail listing.
Reading the results: prefer the option that lists web pages containing the image over the visual-match carousel. The carousel routinely presents same-genre photographs as matches.
Weak at: exact-duplicate provenance; ordering by date; non-Latin scripts in low-resource languages.
Failure mode: answers a question you didn't ask. You want "where did this photo come from" and it tells you which sneaker it is.

Entry: https://www.bing.com/images — camera icon; upload, paste URL, or drag.
Matching model: visual similarity plus object detection.
Best at: the region-select box. After you upload, drag a rectangle over any part of the image and it re-searches only that region — the fastest way to run the crop-and-retry loop without leaving the browser. Also picks up product and object matches Google misses.
Weak at: date ordering; non-Western geography.
Failure mode: heavy commercial bias; shopping results crowd out pages.

Entry: https://tineye.com/ — upload or URL. Browser extension available. A paid API exists for bulk work.
Matching model: perceptual hashing over its own crawl. It is looking for this image, not for images like it.
Best at: the sort orders. Oldest gives you the earliest copy in its index. Biggest image gives you the highest-resolution copy, which is usually nearest the source. Most-changed surfaces copies that have been cropped, recoloured, text-overlaid or watermarked, and it displays them aligned against your input so you can see exactly what changed — no other free engine does this.
Weak at: coverage. The index is small relative to Google's or Yandex's, and faces are not supported at all.
Failure mode: zero results, frequently, on perfectly ordinary images. Never read a TinEye null as evidence.

Entry: https://graph.baidu.com/ or the camera icon at https://image.baidu.com/.
Best at: Chinese-language web content, Chinese e-commerce and social platforms, Chinese street scenes and signage.
Practical notes: interface is Chinese-only; some functionality is region-gated. Worth the friction when a case has any China nexus.

Read the consent and legality section of the parent skill before using any of these. Facial templates are biometric data.

Engine	Index	Notes
PimEyes	Open web, broad	Paid for URLs. Terms position it as self-search; offers an opt-out and removal requests. Strong recall, look-alike false positives common.
FaceCheck.ID	Open web, weighted toward news, court and social sources	Paid credits. Returns a similarity score — treat the score as a ranking, not a probability.
Search4Faces	VK, Odnoklassniki and related Russian platforms	The right tool when the subject's social footprint is Russian-language.

None of these produce auditable reasoning. A hit is a lead requiring independent corroboration — a second photo, a name, a shared associate.

Input	Order to run	Notes
Profile avatar	Yandex, then TinEye, then Lens	Reused avatars are a strong sockpuppet indicator. Also check for stock.
Passport/ID photo	Yandex, then face engines only if authorized	Legally sensitive. Consider not uploading at all.
Protest or conflict scene	Yandex, TinEye, Lens	Recycled footage is the norm. TinEye oldest sort matters most here.
Product for sale (scam check)	Lens, Bing, Baidu	Stolen listing photos are near-universal in marketplace fraud.
Logo or letterhead	Lens, Bing	Also OCR the text and search it as a string.
Screenshot of a tweet or chat	Lens for the OCR text, then search that text	Screenshots defeat image matching; the text does not.
Video frame	Yandex, Lens, TinEye per keyframe	Extract keyframes first; search three or more.
Artwork or illustration	TinEye, then Lens	TinEye's modified-copy detection is designed for exactly this.
Satellite or aerial image	None of the above reliably	Go to `geolocate-from-pixels` and match terrain directly.

Browser extensions that fan a single right-click out to several engines (RevEye, "Search by Image") remove most of the tedium. They open one tab per engine with the same input.
Search order matters for cost, not for results: run the free engines to exhaustion before spending credits on a face engine.
Record, per engine, the query you ran (full frame, crop, flipped, upscaled) and the outcome including nulls. A null against a documented query is a defensible statement; "I searched and found nothing" is not.
Archive every match URL immediately. Match pages disappear, and a screenshot without an archive capture is weak evidence.