Face Search: Let Guests Find Their Photos with a Selfie

At a big event, guests upload hundreds of photos, and finding the ones you're in means scrolling through all of them. With Face Search, a guest opens the public album, taps Find my photos, takes a selfie and sees every photo they appear in, in a few seconds.

Face Search is included from the Professional plan up. On the other paid plans you can add it to an event for $9.99.

Step 1: Add Face Search to Your Event

1. Open the dashboard and select your event
2. Scroll to the Face Search card on the event's control panel
3. If your plan includes it, the card says Included in your plan. Otherwise click Add Face Search and complete the checkout

Only the event's organizer can buy it. Free events can't add it: upgrade the event to a paid plan first.

Step 2: Switch It On

1. In the Face Search card, tick the box confirming you'll let guests know that the faces in the event's photos are scanned so they can find their photos, and that they can opt out
2. Click Turn on Face Search

Fotify then indexes every photo already in the gallery in the background, and each new photo as it's uploaded. The card shows the progress ("Indexing photos: 120 of 340"). A few hundred photos take a few minutes.

Guests also see a short note on the upload page saying that faces in the photos they share are scanned for the album.

What Guests See

On the public album, guests find a Find my photos banner above the photos:

1. They tap Find my photos and agree to their selfie being compared with the faces in the event's photos
2. They take a selfie, or pick a photo of themselves
3. The album shows only the photos they appear in. Show all photos brings the whole album back

The search shows exactly what the album already shows: photos waiting for approval, deleted photos and private albums never appear, and a password-protected album still asks for its password first. Guests on a sub-album's own link only get matches from that album.

For the best results, guests should take the selfie in good light, facing the camera, without sunglasses.

Guests Who Don't Want to Be Found

Any guest can leave Face Search from the album: in the Find my photos window they tap Don't want to be found? Leave Face Search and take a selfie. Their face is removed from every indexed photo, and photos uploaded later skip it too. The photos themselves stay in the album.

The Face Search card shows how many guests opted out. Because leaving only takes a face photo, someone with the album link could also remove other guests using faces from the album. If you see opt-outs you don't recognize (for example many at once), click Undo opt-outs: everyone who opted out is back in Face Search and their photos are indexed again. This also undoes the opt-outs of guests who left themselves, so use it only when the opt-outs look wrong.

Privacy and How Face Data Is Deleted

• Faces are compared by Amazon Rekognition (Amazon Web Services). Each event has its own face index, used for nothing else
• A guest's search selfie is only used for that search and is never stored. When a guest opts out, a face code from their selfie is kept only to leave them out, and it's deleted with the rest of the event's face data
• When a photo is deleted, its faces are deleted within the hour
• Turning Face Search off deletes every face stored for the event at once. If you turn it on again, all photos are indexed from scratch
• Faces are also deleted within the hour when the gallery expires, when the event is deleted, or if the add-on is refunded

Not available in Illinois

Illinois' biometric privacy law (BIPA) requires a written release from everyone whose face is scanned, which a guest gallery can't collect. Face Search can't be switched on for events whose venue is in Illinois, and guests can't search from Illinois.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Face Search work with videos? A: Not yet. Face Search finds people in photos only.

Q: A guest says some of their photos are missing from the results. Why? A: Faces that are small, blurry, turned away or partly covered may not be recognized. Ask them to try another selfie in good light, facing the camera.

Q: Can I use Face Search on a free event? A: No. Face Search is available on paid plans: it's included from the Professional plan up, and other paid plans can add it for $9.99.

Q: Can my AI assistant switch it on? A: Yes, when you connect Fotify to Claude or another assistant over MCP, it can check Face Search, switch it on after you confirm guests are told, and follow the indexing. In the ChatGPT app, switch it on in the dashboard.

Q: Can guests in a private album be found? A: No. Photos in private albums are never included in Face Search results.