How Ollie Finds Your Lookalike
Ollie turns the face in your photo into a list of 512 numbers, a facial fingerprint, and compares it with the fingerprints of thousands of celebrity photos. The five celebrities whose fingerprints are closest to yours are your matches. The photo you choose matters more than anything else, so most of this guide is about picking a good one.
Choose the Right Photo
Use a photo where your face is front-facing, fills a good part of the frame, and is the only face in the picture. If there are several people, Ollie matches the largest face, which may not be yours.
Take off sunglasses, move hair away from your eyes if you can, and skip heavy beauty filters or face-slimming effects: they change the shape the network sees. A plain, recent selfie usually beats a dramatic photo.
Get the Lighting Right
Soft, even light is best: facing a window in daylight, or outside in open shade. Strong light from one side throws shadows that hide half the face, and very dark photos lose detail around the eyes and jaw.
Avoid bright light directly behind you, which turns your face into a silhouette. If a photo looks grainy or blurry when you zoom in, the network will struggle with it too.
Pick Who You Are Compared With
Under the upload box you can choose who you are compared with. By default Ollie estimates from your photo whether your face looks male or female and shows celebrities of that gender, using each celebrity's gender as recorded on Wikidata. The Gender menu is set to Auto-detect; switch it to Men or Women to choose yourself. The Compare with menu next to it narrows the list to Actors, Singers or Footballers.
Read Your Results
You get your top five matches, each with the celebrity's photo that matched you best and a percentage. The percentage is a rescaled similarity score: it is good for comparing your matches with each other, but it isn't a probability and doesn't mean you share anyone's identity.
Every celebrity photo comes from Wikimedia Commons under a free license, and the photographer is credited under each result. Tap a photo to see it larger.
Try More Than One Photo
Different photos of the same person can give different matches, because lighting, angle and expression all change the fingerprint. Try two or three good photos. The names that keep coming back are your most reliable lookalikes.
Your Privacy
Your photo is used only to run the search. It is processed in memory and discarded when the search finishes: Ollie doesn't store it, keep your face fingerprint, or use it for training.