Notes1 min read
Search by image / find by face: what you can and can't find
Upload a screenshot to find the title, or upload a face to find the person. The two pipelines cover different ground — this guide spells out the limits so you don't waste tries.
The camera next to the search box in the top bar is the entry point, or go straight to image search. Uploads are processed asynchronously: once the job is submitted the page polls for results by itself, so you don't have to wait around.
Search by image: find which title a picture comes from
- Covers, posters, stills and video screenshots are all worth a try.
- Cropped, watermarked or compressed images are usually still recognized, but the hit rate drops noticeably when the colors have been heavily altered or only a close-up detail remains.
- This pipeline covers all titles.
Find by face: find out who a face belongs to
- The face needs to be clear and not too far turned; blurry or half-visible faces are basically unrecognizable.
- The face pipeline covers fewer people than the title pipeline covers titles: it's built only from images where we can be sure “there's just one person in this picture” — group shots can't reliably match faces to names, so we leave them out rather than guess.
- So no result doesn't mean the person isn't in our database; more likely there's no usable single-person image.
Both pipelines must preprocess queries exactly the way images were preprocessed when indexed, otherwise query vectors won't match the stored ones — that's a backend matter, but it decides how your upload gets resized and padded.