Welcome to our guide on performing anime character search! To make full use of this article, it might be a good idea to first read how to find anime by picture, which explains the basics relating to the question, “how to find an anime character by image?”. This article expands on those lessons and takes your anime character finder by image skills to another level!
Are you looking for the best way to find anime character by image? Or maybe you have been frustrated for the past hour, trying to find an anime character, while only having a couple of details to go on like hair color and an obscure picture. Luckily, there are many ways to find that anime character that peaked your interest! The main one being performing an anime character search, either by image, by description, by or by appearance. In this article, I will teach you how to search for anime characters using some advanced tricks and free tools online.
How to Find Anime Character By Image
We have already given an overview of tools for anime character reverse image search that are among the best to use, if you are looking to perform a “who is this anime character image search”.
But since writing that article, I have learned some new ways to find the anime character I’m currently looking for. This time, I will go into further detail and teach you guys some advanced ways of using these tools to find anime characters.
I encourage you to not give up if the first anime character reverse image search does not yield a positive result.
Depending on the anime character identifier image you have at hand, some of these methods will be more effective than others. If you analyze the information you have and play around with different methods, you will definitely find the anime character you are looking for.
Find Anime Character by Picture: Use The Best Tools Available
No matter how good of an anime character recognizer you are, there are always tools that can get the job done better than plain old memory. In my last article on anime character reverse image search, I recommended Google image search, TinEye, and even the obscure anime character identifier service SauceNAO.
Whereas the first two of these tools, are indeed excellent for anime character search, it has come to my attention that I left out some good anime character searcher tools in my last article.
1. Yandex
The best anime sauce finder tool left out from the last article is Yandex. It is basically the Russian version of google, and it is very good. So much so, that it is even used by cybersecurity specialists as a means to track down criminals.
The anime character reverse image search process is straightforward: just navigate to yandex.com/images/, click the camera icon to open the reverse image search view:
Then either insert a URL or upload a file by drag and drop or by selecting a file from your hard drive:
2. Bing
Another undiscussed reverse image search option to find anime character by image is offered by Microsoft’s Bing. Since search engines have never been the bread and butter of Microsoft, this shouldn’t be the go-to tool when we wish to find anime character by picture.
It is worth a shot, however, in case the aforementioned services have all failed to find the anime character you are looking for.
The search process itself is very convenient. Just navigate to Bing.com and select the camera icon.
This opens up a prompt that gives you the options of browsing your local disk and uploading the image to the Bing server, posting an image URL, drag and dropping a photo and taking a photo with your own device.
The last anime character picture search option is not available for google image search at the moment. A plus point for Bing.
Search Anime Character by image: Use a Meta Search Tool
To paraphrase a great article from DomainTools, the best reverse image search tool is all of them. One option then, would be to try out the anime characters visual search services I recommended one-by-one.
Another, smarter way, is to hit multiple birds with one stone and use a meta search tool, that performs the same anime character reverse image search on multiple services at the same time and displays the results on the same interface.
The tool to look at here would be hostingchecker.com. It provides a simple way to query the most reliable indexes: Google, TinEye, Bing, and Yandex with one request.
Essentially this is the biggest anime character database that one can process using online tools.
As an extra bonus, the service also generates google searches that combine your anime image with a domain search query to the most popular stock photo websites.
Anime character Visual Search: Improve the Quality of the Anime Image
When in spite of using all the best tools available, your anime character reverse image search still has not worked, it is time to update the source material itself.
First, make a backup of the picture you were using to find that anime character and try out the following tricks on the copy.
1. Make Sure the Anime Picture is not Flipped
This one may seem obvious, but if the image you are using for anime character visual search happens to be misaligned for some reason, it is a good idea to move it to a natural spot on the horizontal and vertical axis.
The best online tool for achieving this is probably Kapwing, but most operating systems come with some basic image editing tools that can achieve this result as well.
2. Crop or Blur Out Irrelevant Parts
A well known tweak for improving reverse image search results is removing blurring parts of the image that do help us find the anime character we are looking for. This includes all irrelevant details, like objects in the background logos, watermarks.
Since our aim is to reverse image search anime characters, we should blur out or crop out the background and make the the job easier for our anime character finder by image tools.
Miyamoto Musashi with scenery cropped
3. Increase The Resolution Of The Source Image
As a rule of thumb, the better the resolution of your image, the better results the anime character search engine will be able to deliver. Under 200×200 pixels you can be pretty sure that your image quality is unacceptable for all search engines.
A nice online tool to use for increasing the source image resolution is ehnace.io. So if your image is low resolution, use it to tweak your photo and you will be able to find anime characters by picture better.
How To Find Anime Character By Description
In this section I will explain various tricks that will help you answer the question, “where is this anime character from”, by gathering or using text based information along with your anime character identifier images.
There is no reason to limit yourself to simply querying text like “what anime character is this picture with green hair”, or reverse searching an image only. It is possible to combine text based queries with images if you want to reverse image search anime characters in advanced ways.
1. Combine Google Image Search With Keyword Search
A pretty neat trick is combining google image search with keywords that you yourself have identified as relevant towards your anime or manga character. This is where your anime character recognizer skills can still come into play.
If you remember any relevant details about the person in the image, these extra keywords can massively improve the anime character search.
A simple example can be seen when we use the cropped image of Miyamoto Musashi from earlier with the keyword suggested by Google:
The related keyword ‘illustration’ wouldn’t be too much off in a general context, but since we are looking for a specific character, it simply won’t do. The visually similar images are even more unhelpful and are clearly related to the suggested keyword, rather than our image.
If we, however, improve the anime character searcher query with a helpful keyword — just to prove a point I will use a very good one — we can see that our results will immediately return panels from the relevant Vagabond manga.
But even if you don’t have keywords as good as that at your disposal, you could use various terms that describe your character and cycle through the results until you realize what anime character is this picture.
2. Combine Google Image Search With a Domain Name
Another way to hack the anime character finder by image process is specifying a relevant domain along with the image search in google reverse image search.
The idea is that you will add a domain that has a high likelihood of containing relevant information, like sites you might use to find an anime character, or sites that contain a lot of content on various anime and manga topics.
Searching the entire domain for relevant results is kind of like a small anime character search engine that you can query in the exact way you want.
Make sure to pick a domain that might contain anime character identifier images as close yo your topic as possible — as you can see when, I add the Vagabond Wiki to our image search, our anime identifier search response becomes much more interesting, since the images are handpicked by the Vagabond Wiki staff, not randomly queried from related domains by Google.
3. Use Text Found On Anime Character Identifier Images
In some cases your anime image will contain text. Even if the meaning does not immediately lead you to the realization “what anime character is this image”, it makes sense to perform a regular text search to see if it might give you hints that help you find that anime character.
With manga and anime character identifier images, a common problem is not understanding the related text, leading to a more difficult anime character visual search. In these cases, the Yandex OCR may prove to be useful. An OCR is a helpful tool, that extracts text from an image and translates it into the chosen language.
All you need to do to use the OCR, is upload your image, and the automatic detection will in case of good examples, locate the foreign language phrases and translate them to the chosen language.
Hints gained from the text on the image itself can greatly simplify your quest to find anime character by description.
4. Use The Image Metadata
In some cases the metadata contained in the image (EXIF) may contain information that might help you search anime character by image.
Things like names of the anime series, domains, or the name of the character itself in lucky cases. You can use this online tool to find out if your image contains any helpful metadata or not.
5. Look at the Image Domain Name
Sometimes if you have saved an image from a specific location, you can take a look at the domain you saved the image from and that might lead you to the relevant info, without using any anime character detector tools.
The method for finding out this location depends on your operation system, but on Mac for example a right click and ‘Get info’ will do the job quite nicely. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how to do this on different operating systems, so I will skip that info in this tutorial.
How To Find Anime Character By Appearance
There are situations when the only thing you remember about an anime character is a mental image of their appearance and you actually don’t have access to an image of the character, or to the relevant anime where they make an appearance.
Performing an anime character search is not hopeless , however, as there are a couple of things to do even at this stage. In this section we will show you how to find anime character by appearance, even without a picture.
1. Use Anime Character Listings, Query Anime Character Database options
One thing to do is to find some popular anime character listings and query them for relevant aspects of the characters appearance. Try to remember as much details as you can about your character, and use the search console provided at the website.
The best anime character database options, in my opinion are the lists at animecharactersdatabase.com, anime-planet.com and myanimelist.net.
All of them, contain a wide selection of anime characters with basic information about their visual appearance, so it is possible to use these sites as an anime character search engine. Certainly, very useful, if used right.
2. Query Relevant Aspects of Appearance in Search Engines
This last one might seem obvious, but will mention it anyway. If you don’t have access to an image, an obvious choice is to perform text based search, describing the appearance of the character you are looking for.
Try to be as specific as possible, and scan through the image results to see if anything matches the appearance in your memory. Some of the tips above can help you in this search as well.
A good way to solve a problem is to use different methods and to use the clues gained from one method for advancing in the other. After some practice, you are bound to become a skilled anime character finder by image or any other method!
It goes without saying that the tips above can also be used to search manga by image, not just anime characters. And of course you can reverse the process to find anime by character, if you already know that information.