How do you reverse-search a video? There is no single “search by video” button and no free public API for it, so the working method is to pull representative key frames from the clip and run each through a reverse image search (Google Lens, Yandex, Bing Visual Search, TinEye), plus search any on-screen text. This tool automates the frame extraction and OCR in your browser and hands each frame to those engines — without uploading your video anywhere.
Why “search by video” doesn’t exist as one click
Google, Bing and Yandex index images, not arbitrary video content, and none exposes a free, browser-callable reverse-search API. Services that advertise “reverse video search” extract frames and fingerprint audio on their servers, which means uploading your footage to a third party. For OSINT and verification work that is often the last thing you want. The reliable, privacy-preserving approach is the manual one, sped up: get the clearest, most distinctive frames, and reverse-image-search those.
How to use it
Drop a video (it is read locally with <video> + <canvas> — nothing is sent anywhere). Choose how many frames to sample; the tool seeks across the clip and grabs evenly spaced frames. For each frame you can Copy it to the clipboard or Save it, then open Google Lens, Yandex, Bing or TinEye and paste/drop it to look for earlier or higher-resolution uploads. Read text runs OCR (Tesseract, in your browser) on a frame to pull signs, watermarks, usernames or chyrons you can then search as text. Pair it with the video verification guide, the C2PA inspector for provenance credentials, and the InVID-WeVerify browser plugin for frame-level forensics.
Tips for better hits
Favour frames with a clear, static subject (a logo, storefront, face, landmark) over motion-blurred ones. Crop to the distinctive object before searching when the engine lets you. Yandex is often strongest for faces and places; Lens for products and text; TinEye for finding the oldest copy of an exact image. A reverse hit on a frame tells you an image appeared somewhere — always open the result and verify the date and context before drawing conclusions.