In this guide
The built-in options: where they're enough, and where they aren't
The iPhone has Visual Look Up in the Photos app: when a small star appears on the ⓘ button, it can identify a plant, an animal or a famous landmark, if the feature is available in your device's language. The Google app and Chrome both include Google Lens. Both are useful, but each is a single engine: Visual Look Up tells you “what is this”, not “where has this photo been posted”, and to compare results from several engines you'd have to open each site and upload the photo again.
That's where Search by Image in Raheeb helps: four engines sit above the results as chips, the photo is uploaded once, and you switch between them as you like.
How to search by image in Raheeb
- 1Open Search by ImageFrom its card in the “Tools” tab.
- 2Choose the engineGoogle Lens is the default, and the app remembers your last choice.
- 3Choose the photoFrom Photos, take one with the camera, or paste it from the clipboard if you copied it in another app.
- 4Browse the resultsThey open inside the app, with the engine chips on top so you can switch without uploading again.
Below the results there are four buttons: back, “Another picture” for a new search, open the result in Safari, and share.
Which engine should you use?
Each engine is built on a different index with a different goal, so the same photo might bring up store pages in one, similar images in another, and published copies in a third. A quick summary:
| Engine | Strongest at | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Google Lens | Products, places and pages with the same photo | You want to know what's in the photo or where it's sold |
| Yandex | Faces and similar images | You're checking your photo hasn't been stolen by another account |
| Bing | Similar images and shopping | You want close alternatives to the same product |
| TinEye | Where this exact copy has spread | You're tracing a news photo or a viral image |
3 situations where reverse image search makes a difference
A product you saw in a story or an ad
Screenshot the story, crop it to the product, and search with Google Lens to find stores that sell it, then Bing for similar alternatives. And if the product turns up in a Pinterest pin you want to keep, see downloading Pinterest photos and videos.
An account using your photos — or someone else's
A store owner or photographer who wants to know whether someone copied their photos: TinEye shows exactly where that copy has spread, and Yandex is strong at similar images even when they've been cropped or slightly altered. The same method exposes a fake account whose profile picture was taken from the internet.
A news photo forwarded in a group chat
Before you forward it, search with TinEye and Google Lens for pages that carry the same photo: plenty of “breaking news” photos turn out to be old or from another country. And if it contains text you want to copy, see copying text from an image.
Search by Image is in the Tools tab — four engines, one photo.
What happens to your photo?
For an engine to read a photo, the photo has to reach it. So Raheeb scales it down to 1600 pixels and uploads it once to freeimage.host — and the screen tells you so plainly before you search. Nothing else leaves your device. Even so, don't search with any photo you never want on the internet — IDs, official documents, private family photos — on any engine.
And for photos you post yourself, there's another step worth taking: remove the location from a photo before you share it.