Find Instagram Profile from Photo: Reverse Image Search

Instagram image search is an unofficial technique to find a user’s profile by using an existing photo. This method involves matching facial features or visual elements through reverse-image search tools or facial recognition technology.

Instagram uses a robust security system to safeguard the privacy of users. All the images and their related data are securely stored, making it difficult to trace a user’s profile. Therefore, there is no simple way to find the profile of a user with an available photo.

Unlike Facebook, which assigns a unique Image ID for images uploaded or downloaded from their site, which can help find the profile of the user. Instagram doesn’t offer any method to find the source of a photo.

The methods mentioned below do not guarantee the detection of the exact profile, but they can help you narrow down your search to get more credible results. In this post, I will talk about methods like reverse picture search, location search, and various tools and techniques.

Note: All the methods work just fine; however, if the Instagram account is set to private, the profile won’t show in the search results.

If the same image has been used on other publicly accessible platforms, links to those pages will show up in the search.

I took it to Instagram, isolated a pic on a separate tab, and examined it with EXIF Viewer to find the following Metadata.

Name: 31283774_60831662887346_68409256740951188224_n.jpg

Kind: JPEG IMG

Size: 199,123 bytes (201 KB on disk)

and more…

I tried digging into the meta but had no success in reverting to the profile.

Note: There is no way you can do a reverse Instagram search on the official app. Also, most of Photos and videos on instagram are not indexed by Search engines, as they are restricted to search crawlers. Still, if photos are not private and the account is little popular you may be lucky enough to find some information related to the Image.

Read: How to Perform Reverse Video Search

How to Find an Instagram Profile From a Picture with Reverse Image Search

Here are Simple yet Powerful methods for an image search on Instagram for finding a profile from a photo.

1. Facecheck ID

FaceCheck.ID is a facial recognition search engine designed to help users verify individuals’ identities by scanning their photos against a vast database. It is by far the most promising facial image search engine available on the web. You can simply upload the photo and wait for the Facecheck service to show matching results.

• I uploaded my photo from Instagram to Facecheck.ID.
  
• The Facecheck is searching from its library.
  
• Facecheck found two matching results of mine.
  
• To open the link, you need to make a payment and buy credits.

2. SauceNAO

SauceNAO is another useful tool for performing a reverse image search on Instagram. The name ‘SauceNAO’ is derived from a slang form of “Need to know the source of this Now!”

Simply upload the image to the SauceNAO website, and it will search for similar images on the internet. This can help you find the source of the image and potentially track down the Instagram profile associated with it.

3. Google Image Search

Reverse Image Search is a powerful technology to find the source of the photo. Reverse Instagram Image Search helps you quickly discover similar images from the internet. You can upload the images onto the Search Engine and the Engine will display images from around the web.

If you upload a picture for ‘Search by Image’, you will be shown all the related photos along with the source. If the URL with the picture is from Instagram, you can find the user and other information corresponding to the profile.

Here are simple steps to do a Reverse Image search for Instagram.

• Visit images.google.com
• You will see a ‘Lens’ along the search bar.
• Click on the Lens icon, upload the image from your storage or directly drag and drop the image.
  
• Hit enter, and you will be shown results corresponding to the pic.
• If there are exact matches for the photo uploaded, you will be shown the ‘See Exact Images‘ option. Click on it to find an image source or person related to that image.
  

There is no guarantee that this will fetch you the required results, and the result will depend on the popularity of the account/photo, whether the account is public, and also on the ability of Google Search to find the correct result.

Search engines limit people’s search results due to privacy concerns, such as filtering out personal information that infringes on privacy rights.

4. Tineye | Instagram Image Search

Tineye specializes in reverse image searching only. The steps are similar to those above. Just upload the image, and you will be greeted with all the related images and sites that host the images. If lucky enough, you can find the original location of the image only. It uses its algorithm to find the images. One such algorithm is perceptual hashing, which is used to create a hash from the sample image.

5. Bing

Bing also has a similar feature by which you can search for the profile or info using an image. Just upload the photo to the Bing engine by clicking on the camera icon, and you will see all the related information if available. The images are hosted anonymously and cannot be discovered by other users. All uploaded photos are automatically deleted.

1. Open Bing Image. Click on the lens icon.

2. Here you can either paste a URL, take a Camera Photo, or upload an image to find the results.

3. The results are well categorized into Text on the Photo, Web Pages with images, and All resolution images. If the image has text, then the results come with the option to copy the text embedded in the image.

6. Social Catfish

On a webspace full of bogus sites claiming about effective reverse image search to find social media accounts, only a few platforms live up to their claims.

One such site is Social Catfish. It claims to deep scan any image input by the user and list out the possible social media accounts associated with the person in the image.

Here are the steps to use Social Catfish. First, it is advisable to download the image to your PC that you want to reverse search.

1. Go to the Social Catfish website.
2. Click on Browse and Upload Image to choose the image you want to reverse search.
   
3. Wait while Social Catfish will then process the image, scan for social media handles, perform a deep scan, check through the scammer database, and organize the final data.
   
4. You have to provide your email address to which Social Catfish will send the information associated with the image directly to your email inbox.
   

Now, many of you might find it intrusive for the platform to ask for your email ID, but that’s how this website works.

Stay assured about the privacy of the image you upload to Social Catfish. Images uploaded on Social Catfish for reverse search remain on their server for 24 hours, and then it is permanently removed.

Note: If the Instagram account is private, most likely, you won’t find any mention of the account by Social Catfish in its reverse image search results.

Curious Case of Reverse-Searching AI Photos Used in Instagram

Since AI has been hyping up the entire world in recent times, I wondered what if someone used an AI-generated photo on their Instagram handle?

Will these reverse image searching tools be able to find the correct social media(Instagram in this context) of the person in the image?

Strangely, none of the tools could point to the correct Instagram handle when a random AI-generated image is used as the Instagram profile picture. Even when the Instagram profile is set to public, none of the reverse image tools could crawl the page.

Now, I’m not blaming these image searching platforms. Due to the change in the Instagram account profile image, the spiders of these reverse search tools might have been unable to crawl the recently updated Instagram photo.

From my experience, if only, it is the photo of a well-known person with widespread presence on the internet, reverse searching can find out the associated Instagram handle and other web presence of that individual.

However, to reverse search the image of a random individual using these tools may/may not redirect you to the correct Instagram handle on which the image has been used. Still, using these image reverse search tools opens new possibilities to find an Instagram account using the profile picture.

Conclusion

Although there is no accurate measure of finding the source of an image for Instagram, the methods above can narrow down the search parameters by using meta or digital photo imprints. I hope the post was helpful. Do comment below for any assistance or support.

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