Below is a comprehensive look at the best ways to locate someone’s hidden social media accounts or dating profiles using online resources.

1. Reverse Image Search

If you’re unfamiliar with reverse image search tools, they work in two ways: find someone’s photos by searching for some other information you know about them, or look up someone’s photo to find webpages where the same photo was posted and/or its similar photos, which might eventually land you on their social media pages.

There are many search engines that offer the reverse image search feature for free, such as Google Images, TinEye, or Bing Visual Search. We’ll show you how to use them.

Find Someone’s Photos on Social Network

Many people enjoy sharing pictures on social media and chances are that the person you’re looking for might like doing so. This means you might be able to find their social media pages by searching for some details you know about them with Google Images. Here’s how to do it: first, you can type the person’s name in the search field and click Search. If you know the city or state where they work, or the company they work for, add that as well. This might bring up webpages containing the same keyword – which could be their social media profile page.

If you are trying to track down the person’s profile on a specific website, just go to Google Images, and type the person’s name and site: followed by the domain and extension, like site:tinider.com, for example. Press Enter and you’ll be able to pull up results just from within the Tinder website.

You can either look up the person’s real name or their username if you know it. If you don’t know their Tinder username, try the username they use on other social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok as people tend to use the same username on different platforms.

You can click on the image and then click Visit to visit the page where the picture is originally posted which could give you some extra results.

As you’ve probably figured out, it’s not easy to find someone this way if they have a common name. As a result, you might be overwhelmed by irrelevant web pages. If this happens to you, don’t worry and keep reading.

Look Up Their Photos

If you have a photo of that person, Google might be able to pick up webpages where they posted the same photo or similar photos to the one you have. This is also extremely useful when you’re trying to research the origins of a photo found online.

All you need to do is open Google Images and upload the image. Google will retrieve webpages where the same photo is listed on. If you’re running a reverse image search of a celebrity, Google might even give you their name.

If you don’t get any luck from these free tools, consider using paid people search tools like Social Catfish which allows you to search for someone’s social media accounts by name, email, phone number, address, and photos.

2. Use Search Engines

If the image search doesn’t help, you might want to go back to a common search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and see if it can bring up the results you need.

Just go to Google and type in the person’s name, approximate location, the school they went to, and occupation if you have the information. Google will return a list of webpages containing the keywords you entered.

You can also search for what you know within a specific website that you suspect the person uses. For example, if you are looking for someone’s Facebook profile, try searches like this:

site:facebook.com “first last”

Replace first last with the person’s name, and make sure that you keep the quotes around the name so Google only looks for exact matches. If that doesn’t bring up the information you need, drop the first name or last name to broaden your search.

You can replace any website after “site:” so that the search is contained within that website only.

3. Try People Search Tools

Finding someone’s information online can be a tedious task. If you don’t feel like putting the legwork in for this, consider using professional people search tools like TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, and Social Catfish.

People search tools are designed specifically to search for people-related information, including names, phone numbers, addresses, emails, social media profiles, pictures, relatives, arrest records, and more. Unlike searching with a common search engine, you get all the information all in one report, in just one search. So if you don’t feel like digging up the information by yourself, give people search tools a try to locate someone’s dating profiles, online presence, and more.

You can utilize these tools in various ways beyond just looking up their social media profiles. For example, you can use them to run a background check on someone you know or on yourself; you can use them to find out who called/emailed you, and you can use them to locate a lost friend.

4. Search by Phone Number

Some people use their phone numbers to register accounts on social media websites. So if you know the person’s phone number, you might be able to find their profile attached to it on the respective social media sites. 

Many platforms have a “find by contacts” feature, such as Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, and more. This allows you to find profiles of people who are on your contacts list. You can do the same on each site you want to follow them on.

If you don’t want the person to know that you’re looking for their profiles, make sure you’re logged out of platforms such as LinkedIn which can show that you’ve looked at someone’s profile. If you’re on their Instagram page, make sure you don’t accidentally like any pictures or you can just create a fake account to browse their page.