Bing Images Search by People

Some keywords just belong to people! Typically, most pictures that are related to movies, sports, community activity, or physical fitness will have a human factor involved. So, it is not surprising that most pictures that show up as results for such keywords include people! Bing Image Search's People filter goes further, because it allows you to restrict your search to pictures where people's faces are prominent, or their heads and shoulders are more prominent. Unfortunately, this filter does not let you search for pictures with silhouettes or even with no people at all—at least not yet.

Follow these steps to get started using the People filter:

1. Access the Bing Image Search (US site). We choose to access the US site since this one has all filters available for now. We used "Hiking" as the search term for this tutorial (see Figure 1).
2. 
   Figure 1: Bing Images Search with no filters selected
3. Do you notice the Filters bar on top of the search results in Figure 1, above? Do note that the fifth filter, People has been highlighted in red.

Changing Appearances?

Bing's Image Search page could change every day, and the screenshots and techniques on this page are current at the time of writing. Even if there are some changes, basic concepts explained on this page should be the same.

2. Click on the People button and it brings up the menu that you see in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Options within the People menu
3. As you can see, this filter allows you to search based on the extent to which people are visible within the picture. Essentially, you can choose from 2 variations. Additionally, the All option returns results of all variations (see Figure 1, above). Let us now explore all these options:

All

4. This is the default option (see Figure 1, earlier on this page), and provides results of all pictures that may or may not contain people.

Just faces

5. Allows you to search photographs with people faces featured prominently. Photographers typically call such pictures portraits (see Figure 3).
6. 
   Figure 3: Results with people faces featured prominently

Head & Shoulders

7. Brings up the results that show more of the human body rather than just the face (see Figure 4).
8. 
   Figure 4: Pictures focused on people's head and shoulders
4. Do remember that you can always combine different filters. For example, it's quite easy to bring up pictures of People, within a wide Layout, restricted to photographic Type, that use the color "Black and white" predominantly. Plus, you can opt to see pictures that are also Large in resolution (see Figure 5).
5. 
   Figure 5: Combine various filters to reveal the power behind Bing Image Search

Remember though that all pictures you find may not be suitable for use in your presentation slides or other projects. Learn how you can find pictures that are allowed to be used in our Bing Image Search by License tutorial.