How to find leaked photos of yourself: the free reverse image search stack
If you think intimate content of you may be online but you do not have specific URLs, reverse image search is the tool that finds it. No removal service can act without URLs, and most automated monitoring cannot find content that is not labelled with your name, so this is a step worth doing yourself regardless of who you eventually hire.
It takes about twenty minutes and the tools that matter are free.
Before you start
Use a clear, well-lit, face-forward photo of yourself. Not the intimate content. Reverse image tools match on facial features, so an ordinary headshot works, and there is no reason to handle the leaked material to run these searches.
Higher resolution helps. Avoid sunglasses, heavy shadow, and extreme angles. If your first search returns little, try again with two or three different photos, because each tool weights facial features differently and results genuinely vary between source images.
The stack, in the order to run it
Google Lens at lens.google.com. Google has the largest image index, so this catches the most mainstream results: social re-uploads, forum posts, aggregator pages that Google has crawled. Start here because it is fastest and covers the most ground.
Yandex Images at yandex.com/images, using the camera icon in the search bar. Yandex's facial matching is widely regarded as the strongest available to the public, and its crawler reaches sites that Google does not index. For offshore hosts in particular this is frequently the tool that finds what nothing else does. The interface is awkward and the results page is unpleasant. Run it anyway.
PimEyes at pimeyes.com. The free tier shows you thumbnail matches, and the URLs sit behind a paid plan. If Google Lens and Yandex have already given you what you need, you can skip it. If they came back thin and PimEyes shows a lot of thumbnails, one month of paid access to extract the URL list is usually worth the cost.
FaceCheck.id at facecheck.id. A different index with different crawl priorities, and its free tier surfaces URLs. Runs here sometimes turn up material that PimEyes misses and the reverse is also true, so if the first one produces hits it is worth running both.
TinEye at tineye.com. Weaker at facial matching than the others but strong at identifying exact-copy re-uploads, meaning the same file moved to a different host. Useful for mapping mirror networks once you know a file is circulating.
Practical notes
Do not revisit the pages you find. Note the URL, close the tab, move on. Every visit is traffic to the host and traffic is what funds these sites.
Record what you find somewhere you can act on later. A plain text file with one URL per line is enough. You will need this list for any removal work, whether you do it yourself or hand it off.
Some hosts serve different content depending on where the request comes from. If Google Lens returns nothing and Yandex returns results, that is normal and does not mean anything is wrong.
Watermarks do not necessarily defeat facial matching, because these tools work on facial geometry rather than whole-image comparison. A watermark over part of a frame often still matches. Exact-copy tools like TinEye are a different story and will be defeated by any re-encoding.
How often to check
If content was recently leaked and is actively being reshared, run the full stack weekly for the first six weeks, then move to monthly. If you are dealing with older known material, monthly is enough.
Put it on a calendar and do it in one session rather than checking compulsively between sessions. Checking daily produces no additional information and considerable additional distress.
A note on what monitoring services can and cannot do
This is worth being direct about, because the industry is not.
Automated monitoring services, including ours, find content by searching text. Names, handles, known aliases. When a page carries your name or handle in its text, a monitoring service will find it. When a page carries your image with no identifying text anywhere on it, text-based monitoring will not find it, and no amount of subscription cost changes that.
That is the gap reverse image search fills, and it is why running it yourself remains worthwhile even when you are paying someone else to handle removals. Our Shield monitoring at $29 per month scans twice weekly for your handles and name variants and surfaces new hits for your approval. It is a genuinely useful net for the large category of content that is labelled with your name, and it is not a substitute for periodic reverse image searching.
Any service that claims to continuously scan the open web by face is describing something different from what it actually does. Ask directly what its discovery mechanism is before you pay for it.
Once you have URLs
That is when removal work becomes possible. Filing through each platform's non-consensual imagery channel handles cooperative hosts. For content on offshore hosts that ignore standard reporting, the escalation runs up the stack through the CDN, the registrar, the payment processor, and search-engine de-indexing.
If the list you have assembled is long or spread across many hosts, our Emergency Takedown runs that full ladder in parallel and keeps the case open until every option is exhausted. Pricing is set by how many distinct domains your content appears on, starting at $499 for one to five.
If you found nothing after running the full stack with several different photos, that is genuinely a good sign, and it is a reasonable point at which to stop looking and check again in a month.