Why Google shows the wrong photograph for your name

The cause is usually an empty field

When Google shows a picture beside your name it is reading from a record, and that record has a field for an image. Where the field is empty, something else fills the gap: a video still, a photograph from a page about somebody else, or nothing at all.

So the question is not usually why Google picked a bad picture. It is why there is no good one for it to pick.

Somebody else's face, on your name

The sharper version of this is a photograph that belongs to a different person with your name.

A family solicitor we audited in August 2026 found that two of the three images shown for her name were of a musician's wife who shares it. Nothing about that is malicious and nothing had gone wrong. The other woman simply had a clearer picture attached to the same words.

This fixes the same way everything else on these pages fixes: by making it unambiguous which person the name belongs to in your case.

You probably do not own your own headshot

This is the part that surprises people and it is a legal point rather than a technical one.

Under UK copyright law the photographer owns the photograph unless it has been assigned in writing. Paying for the shoot does not transfer it. Being sent the file does not transfer it. Most people supplying us a headshot do not own it and have never had reason to find out.

Paying a photographer buys you the picture. It does not buy you the copyright in it, which needs a separate agreement in writing.

For a page we build and host, a licence from you is enough and is one clause. For the open databases that feed a picture through to Google, a free licence is required, which is a larger ask and one the photographer has to agree to.

What to do about it

In order:

• Find out who owns the copyright in the photograph you want used. Usually it is the photographer.
• Get it in writing, and get it broad enough to cover an open licence if you want the picture to travel.
• Put the picture on a page of your own that is clearly about you, so there is a correct candidate to be found.
• Accept that the fix is slower than the fault. An image already attached to a name is replaced rather than deleted.

We will not upload a photographer's work as though it were yours, which is the shortcut that gets pictures taken down later and accounts restricted. Why somebody else comes up on your name covers the wider version of the same problem.