How to Opt Out of PimEyes and Remove Your Face From Search

What does opting out of PimEyes actually do?

Opting out tells PimEyes to stop showing your face in its search results. The results matched to your submitted photo are added to a blocklist of URLs and image hashes, which also stops identical images being re-indexed later.

It helps to know what PimEyes is. It is a face search engine: it crawls public web pages, extracts faces, and indexes facial signatures linked to the URLs where each photo lives. PimEyes says ↗ it stores these indexes rather than the photos themselves. So an opt-out does not delete your photos anywhere, because PimEyes never hosted them. It removes the pointers, so a stranger searching your face gets nothing back from PimEyes. How face search works, and why it is more invasive than reverse image search, is covered in is your face searchable.

Is the PimEyes opt-out free?

Yes. The opt-out form is free and PimEyes states that plainly, on the logic that customers should pay for services, not for their rights. You do not need any subscription to be removed from results.

PimEyes also sells paid plans, including a PROtect tier that adds monitoring alerts and help sending takedown requests to the sites hosting your photos. That can be convenient, but do not confuse it with the opt-out: hiding your face from PimEyes results costs nothing, and you can send takedown and removal requests yourself for free too.

How do you opt out of PimEyes, step by step?

1. 1.Go to the PimEyes opt-out request form ↗
2. 2.Upload one clear, recent, front-facing photo of yourself. No sunglasses, no group shots, nothing covering your face, and ideally taken in the last couple of years
3. 3.Upload a scan or photo of a government ID such as a passport or driving licence. Redact everything you want, ID number, address, dates, except your name and your photo, which must stay readable
4. 4.Enter an email address you check, and state your reason. Citing your legal basis, such as the GDPR right to erasure if you are in the UK or EU, makes rejection less likely
5. 5.Submit. You should get an automated confirmation by email, then a decision later
6. 6.Once approved, run a search on yourself if you can, and repeat the opt-out with a different photo of you. PimEyes' own guidance says one request may not catch every match, since different angles and older photos can slip through

The form itself takes a few minutes. Blurry selfies, obstructed faces, and IDs with the photo or name redacted are the common reasons requests get rejected, so it is worth getting the two uploads right the first time.

The catch: you have to send PimEyes your ID

To be removed from a face search engine, you hand that same engine a verified photo of your face and your legal name. That is a real privacy trade-off, and you should make it deliberately, not accidentally.

PimEyes says the ID is used to verify the request is genuinely yours, which is fair as far as it goes: without verification, anyone could delist anyone. You keep the trade-off small by redacting aggressively. Black out the document number, address, date of birth, and every other field, leaving only your name and the ID photo visible. Never send an unredacted ID. If handing any ID to PimEyes is a line you will not cross, that is a legitimate choice; your alternative is attacking the source photos instead, covered below.

How long does the PimEyes opt-out take?

PimEyes does not publish a firm timeline. You typically get an automated confirmation quickly, and reports of the full process range from a few business days to several weeks.

If weeks pass with no decision, reply to the confirmation email or resubmit with a better photo and a clearly stated legal basis, since quiet rejections are usually about the uploads, not the request.

What does the opt-out not do?

• -It does not delete your photos from the internet. The source pages hosting them are untouched, and anyone with the link, or a different search engine, can still find them
• -It only covers PimEyes. Other face search engines, such as FaceCheck.ID, keep their own indexes and need their own removal requests
• -It is not permanent by default. New photos of you, or the same photo at a new URL, can be indexed later, which is why repeat opt-outs with different photos are recommended
• -It does not stop your face being scraped in the first place. Every public photo of you remains raw material for the next engine

What else should you do beyond PimEyes?

Treat the PimEyes opt-out as one step, not the fix. The durable move is cutting the number of public photos of you, since every face engine is only as powerful as the images it can crawl.

Set social profiles to private and strip old public photos you no longer need, especially profile pictures on accounts you forgot you had. Submit removal requests to other face engines, such as FaceCheck.ID's own opt-out, and ask the sites hosting photos of you to take them down, which is what actually removes the source. Use Google's Results about you to delist pages exposing your personal information. And remember photos leak more than your face: camera metadata and backgrounds can expose where you live, which I cover in what your photos reveal.

The hard part is knowing where those photos and forgotten accounts are in the first place. That is a digital footprint problem, and it is exactly what Clearfront does: it scans the accounts, profiles, breaches, and public records tied to your name, email, and usernames in one sweep, free and open source, running entirely on your own machine. Install Clearfront free to find the profiles still serving photos of your face, or get the free removal guide and work through taking them down, PimEyes and all.