Face Extractor

How It Works

When you choose a photo, a lightweight face-detection neural network (loaded once from a public CDN) scans it for faces and returns a bounding box around each one. This tool then draws each of those boxes — expanded by your chosen padding percentage — directly onto your original, full-resolution photo to produce each cropped face. Nothing about your photo is downscaled or recompressed in the process, and nothing is uploaded: the detection model runs inside your browser using WebGL, the same way it would run on a server, just on your own device instead.

How to Use This Tool

1. Upload a photo containing one or more people. Group photos, family portraits, and team photos all work well.
2. Wait a moment for the detection model to load (only happens once per visit) and scan the photo.
3. Review the numbered boxes drawn over each detected face. If a face was missed — common with faces turned to the side, partially covered, or very small in the frame — lower the Detection Sensitivity slider and click Re-scan.
4. Adjust Padding if you want each cropped face to include more of the surrounding head and shoulders rather than a tight face-only box.
5. Download individual faces from the grid below, or grab all of them at once with Download All as ZIP.

If you want to crop or straighten a single photo by hand instead of relying on automatic detection, the image cropper gives you full manual control. Once you've extracted a face, the circle crop tool is a natural next step for turning it into a round profile picture or avatar.

Good Use Cases

• Pulling individual headshots from a group or team photo for a staff page or directory.
• Extracting a face from an old family photo to use as a starting point for a keepsake or print.
• Building a quick set of avatar source images from event or conference photos.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my photo uploaded to a server?

No. Only the detection model itself (a small set of pretrained neural network weight files) is downloaded from a public CDN the first time you use the tool. Your photo is read locally with the File API and processed entirely in your browser — it's never transmitted anywhere.

Why did it miss a face, or draw a box in the wrong place?

Automatic face detection works best on faces that are reasonably large in the frame, well-lit, and facing mostly toward the camera. Small, heavily shadowed, extremely angled, or partially obscured faces are harder to detect reliably. Lowering the sensitivity slider and re-scanning often recovers faces that were missed on the first pass, though it can occasionally also flag a non-face region.

Will the extracted faces be blurry or lower quality than the original?

No. Each extracted face is cropped directly from your original, full-resolution photo — not from a shrunken preview — so image quality is identical to the source for that region. The only exception is if your source photo itself was already low-resolution or blurry.

Does this identify who the people are?

No. This tool only detects that a face exists and where its bounding box is — it has no facial recognition or identification capability, and doesn't compare faces against any database or to each other. It simply crops each detected region out as an image.

Can I run this on a photo with dozens of people in it?

Yes, though detection quality drops as faces get smaller relative to the whole image. For very large group photos, a higher-resolution source photo and a lower sensitivity setting will generally produce the most complete results.