Covering 2 things today:
Reverse Image Searching
Viewing EXIF Data
Reverse Image Searching:
Simply put, this is how you can take an image and search based upon that. You can often use it to find information on individuals or places. The most common usage is google’s reverse image search:
If I were to put something in here like this photo and crop it to just the area of interest:
I can see some pretty interesting results and direct matches: https://www.nps.gov/thingstodo/take-a-stroll-to-horseshoe-bend-overlook.htm
This tells me that this is a photograph of horseshoe bend in Glen Canyon National Park. This doesn’t just apply to nature photos (duh), it works better with city landscapes a lot of the time. But I put this in here to bring attention to landmarks and distinguishable features.
Google isn’t the only search engine that does things like this. Yandex (a russian search engine) can also be pretty good with landmark identification and facial identification. I’ve only experimented a little bit with the facial identification side of things with Yandex, as I would rather not upload information to a russian proxy (admittedly though, they probably have most OSI logged or managed somewhere anyways). But it is helpful that it has a “similar images” section that may or may not have more information on a given individual/location. It seems that the results are “fuzzier” which can actually work in our favor when trying to find similar things. However, it does seem results are more centric around europe and that geographic area.
But it’s really not perfect, it’s something to keep in mind if you’re not finding anything on google.
One more resource that can be helpful when you’re just trying to find search results (but it’s not perfect) is tineye. It’s not perfect, and is not as extensive as google, but it can be good nonetheless (it’s ‘private’ supposedly too).
Now this last resource is creepy, as it’s quite good at finding individuals, but it is also a paid resource. And that is PimEyes. It’s very good at finding similar photos of faces, but again it’s paid. There are other resources too like Clearview AI if you’re looking for something commercial.
So far for reverse image searching we have these links:
Google Images/Image Search
Yandex
Clearview AI - really for commercial purposes
That’s all I’ve gotta say at the moment on that. Now onto EXIF data.
Viewing EXIF Data
this is becoming less relevant overtime, but still, something to know and add into your methodology. The tldr is this: If you leave location services on when taking pictures, there is a good chance that there is hidden metadata within the image. Social media and lots of sites generally parse this out when uploading, but not all sites do. And that metadata can contain pretty vulnerable location information. like this:
and this:
Camera, location and image metadata. Kinda spooky. This isn’t my image, but an example image from TCM Security.
The website I was using here was jimpl. If it goes down, just google a separate EXIF viewer, there’s usually a good load of them out there.
That’s it, see you soon.
