A photo shows up online. Someone in the open source intelligence community checks the metadata and finds that the same camera serial number appears in another image posted earlier by a different account. That single…
You spend hours in Lightroom writing captions, adding keywords, and setting copyright notices. You export the images, upload them to a stock agency or a client portal, and they arrive with empty fields.
There's a category of software that most people never come across. It is not just because of obscurity, but because it works so quietly in the background, you'll only ever discover it when you need it. ExifTool belongs…
Consider a common scenario. You are a wedding photographer. Three years after a shoot, the father of the bride calls and asks for a specific photo. Your archive holds 400,000 images. Without good metadata, that search…
In 2012, antivirus founder and then fugitive John McAfee was interviewed by Vice. The magazine published a photo of him that still carried GPS coordinates in its EXIF data, and those coordinates pointed to his location…
AI-generated images are now common in social feeds. Some are obvious, but many are hard to distinguish from photographs at a glance. Automated detection is unreliable, so one of the better starting points for…
There is a recurring category of news story that goes like this: a government agency or law firm releases a redacted PDF, and within hours readers discover that some "redacted" sections are still readable. In many cases…
Security researchers have a common demonstration: they pull a handful of photos from someone's public social media account, extract any GPS coordinates embedded in the files, and plot them on a map.
Run ExifTool on an unedited video straight from your phone. The output usually covers more than just codec and resolution: camera model, lens info, GPS coordinates sampled during the recording, gyroscope data, audio…
In digital forensics, pixels alone are often ambiguous, but the metadata attached to a file is usually a more reliable record of how and where an image was created. Every photo you take, whether it is of your dog or of…
A simple experiment: take one photograph with its EXIF data intact, then upload the same file to seven different platforms.
You are scrolling through your photo library from an old trip and find a shot you like. You want to recreate the look for a new project, but you do not remember the lens, focal length, or exposure settings you used.
You are browsing used gear and find a Canon 5D Mark III listed at a low price. The body looks clean in the photos and the seller describes it as a backup that rarely left the studio. Before buying, you ask for a recent…