Face swap templates

Why there is no template library here

SwapX used to ship a handful of built-in scenes. They were removed, and it is worth saying why rather than quietly dropping the subject.

Most people who tapped one were not trying to make anything. They were checking whether the tool worked — two taps, a stranger's face in a café, a result nobody wanted. That is a reasonable thing to want, but it is a demonstration, and it was being paid for in credits by people who thought they were starting a project.

The other reason is narrower and harder. A template library has to be maintained: every scene needs a licence that covers what you then do with the output, and a small library nobody keeps current turns into a licensing claim that has not been checked in a year. Better not to make a promise of that shape than to make one we stop keeping.

What actually makes a scene work

This is the part of the template idea that is genuinely true: a face swap is only as good as the target it goes into. Templates look better not because of anything in the swap itself, but because somebody picked a good photograph. You can pick one too, and the criteria are not subtle.

• The face is turned towards the camera. Not necessarily straight on, but not in profile either. A three-quarter view is fine; the back of someone's head is not.
• The lighting has a direction you can see. Even, unambiguous light is easiest. Heavy backlighting, a face half in shadow, or a single hard light from below all give the model contradictory information about the shape of a face.
• The face takes up enough of the frame. A person at the far end of a room gives the model perhaps forty pixels of face to work from. Crop in, or pick a closer shot.
• The image is sharp where the face is. Motion blur and heavy compression both remove exactly the detail the result depends on.

The same applies to the face you bring, and in practice that is the one people get wrong more often. The difference between an acceptable result and a good one is usually the source photograph, not the scene.

Where to get a scene you are allowed to use

In rough order of how little trouble it causes:

• Your own photos and video. No licensing question at all, and the result is usually more interesting than a stock scene because it is yours.
• Stock libraries with a clear licence. Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay are free and permissive, but read the licence rather than assuming — some images carry model-release limits that matter precisely because you are changing the person's face.
• Paid stock. Standard licences from the usual vendors generally cover derivative work, and generally do not cover making a person appear to do or say something they did not. That is not a technicality here; it is the whole of what a face swap does.

What does not work: a frame from a film, a photograph of a public figure, or anything pulled from someone's social media. The licence question and the consent question are different questions, and that kind of source fails both at once.

Consent, which templates never solved anyway

The face you bring must be your own, or one you have explicit permission to use. A prepared scene never changed that and was never a route around it — the person whose face is being moved is the one with something at stake, and no amount of licensing on the background addresses that.

Placing a real person into sexual content without their consent is illegal in the US, UK, EU and Australia, and is prohibited on SwapX regardless of where you are. The full policy is in the Acceptable Use Policy.