In the future, tools to assist police with this could include audit logs built directly into the camera, or the insertion of a watermark. The future of image forensicsĪuthenticating an image to ensure it hasn’t been modified and upholding the chain of custody – the paper trail or provenance documentation that goes along with a piece of evidence – is increasingly important to police. This obvious privacy concern is why Facebook, for example, typically removes metadata from uploaded images.Īccording to a Facebook spokesperson, information including GPS data is automatically removed from photos uploaded onto the platform to protect people “from accidentally sharing private information, such as their location”. The precise location of Richard’s office at the University of Adelaide is discovered using the metadata contained within the bookshelf photo. Accusations soon emerged that the image was photoshopped. The images supplied by the RSPCA to The Advertiser showed a duck with a knife impaled into its head. In a recent investigation, we were able to validate a group of images known as the Byethorne duck. Tags can include image size, location data, a smaller thumbnail of the image and even the make and model of the camera.

This specification helps cameras use formats that can be exchanged between devices – for example, ensuring an iPhone photo appears correctly on a Samsung device.

There are more than 460 metadata tags within the exchangeable image file format for digital still cameras ( EXIF 2.3). When an image is saved, the file typically contains data about the image, known as metadata. Here we’ll be focusing on the metadata captured in images (level 5 in the schema above). It is often the unseen that begins our investigation rather than the seen. The image pipeline with each section numerically allocated based on features that investigators are likely to analyse.

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