How to Tell If a Photo Is Real or Fake

A profile you come across on a dating app looks a little too perfect. A seller’s product photo on a secondhand marketplace looks like it was pulled straight from a catalog. A photo shared as “our company team” in a job listing looks familiar, but you can’t quite place where you’ve seen it.

There’s a way to investigate these suspicions using the photo itself, not just words: reverse image search. Just like typing text into Google, you can ask Google “where have you seen this before” using an image.

How to Do It on a Computer

Using Google Images:

1. Go to images.google.com.
2. Click the camera icon in the search box.
3. Upload the photo you’re suspicious of, or paste the photo’s link.
4. Google lists where the same or a similar image has been used online.

A faster method in Chrome: You can right-click an image on a web page and use the “Search Image with Google” option. This automatically uploads the image and shows the results in a side panel.

How to Do It on a Phone

On your phone, you can use the Google app or Google Lens.

1. Open the Google app and tap the camera icon in the search box.
2. Select a photo from your gallery, or point Lens directly at an image on the screen.
3. Among the results, you can see where else the image has been used.

To try this on a photo from Instagram or a dating app, you’ll first need to take a screenshot of the photo and upload it from your gallery.

What Kinds of Results Should Raise a Red Flag

The following situations in your reverse image search results should catch your attention:

• The same photo showing up under a completely different name, on a social media account in a different country
• The photo appearing on a stock photo site (such as Shutterstock or Pexels) or on a modeling agency’s page
• A product photo in a sale listing being identical to the promotional image on the manufacturer’s official website. This alone doesn’t necessarily mean fraud, but it can be a sign that you should question whether the seller actually has the product in hand
• A photo shared in a news story as being “from the scene” that actually turns out to have been taken years earlier, in a completely different event

The Limits of This Method

Reverse image search shows whether a photo has existed online before. If the photo genuinely belongs to that person and has never been shared anywhere before, the search may return no results. In that case, getting “no results found” doesn’t necessarily mean the photo is definitely genuine — it just means it hasn’t been detected anywhere else before.

Frequently Asked Questions