What happens to your photo.
Free Headshots runs two small vision models inside your browser. Your photo is opened on your own computer and processed there. There is no upload step, because there is no server to upload to.
| What | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Your photo | Nowhere. It stays in the tab, and is gone when you close it. |
| The headshot | Nowhere, until you download it yourself. |
| The model weights | Downloaded to your browser cache once, then reused offline. |
| Page analytics and ads | Standard third-party cookies from Google, subject to your consent. See the privacy policy. |
Nothing here is generated
The models do not draw anything. They only locate things: which pixels are background, hair, skin and clothes, and where 478 points on your face sit. Everything after that is ordinary image processing.
So the person in the result is the person in the photo. Your facial features are never redrawn or replaced: the background, the lighting, the framing and the retouching change around them. A generative service works the other way, rebuilding your face from a model's idea of a face like yours. The trade is that this one will not put you in a suit you were not wearing.
How the site is paid for
Advertising, and nothing else. No paid tier, no upsell, no account. The processing happens on your computer rather than on a server we rent, so the cost of running this does not climb with the number of headshots people make. That is what makes free sustainable here.
The models
A portrait segmenter and a 478-point face mesh, both from Google's MediaPipe work and both released under Apache-2.0, running through ONNX Runtime Web. About 20 MB together, fetched once per device and cached. We host the weights ourselves rather than hot-linking them, and we deliberately passed over candidate models whose training data carried non-commercial terms.
What it needs
Any reasonably recent browser with WebAssembly. WebGPU is used only where it measurably helps: the tool benchmarks both on your machine and keeps whichever is faster and correct.
Who runs it
Free Headshots is an independent project run from Europe. It is not affiliated with Google. Reach us at hello@free-headshots.com.