Bellingcat Online Investigation Kit: Image and Video Inspection

21 April 2023 4 minutes Author: Cyber Witcher

True or fake?

Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine a person without a gadget, which he uses very actively. These are photos and videos, online maps and navigators. But not everyone knows that any use of the device and its functions leaves its mark in the Internet space. And on this trace, you can very easily find the location, coordinates, date and time of the person’s stay. And for this search, there are many tools, applications and programs using metadata. With their help, you can search for information among dozens of social media and websites. Metadata is used to improve search quality. Search queries that use metadata can save the user from unnecessary manual filtering work.

There are also plugins and search systems that can be used to search for people by face and image on the Internet, to check the sources of information or the authenticity of this information. Because fakes are a common type of information that we encounter on the Internet. Fakes become so inventive or so impressive that you involuntarily question your own ability to think critically. That is why we need useful tools for checking images, videos and searching for information in social networks. But it is necessary to check not only the information, but also the person who spreads the information. There are a number of resources for this as well. Among the various types of content, it is the most difficult to verify the authenticity of a video. After all, now anyone with the slightest level of knowledge can change a video clip in the simplest programs for this purpose. And here, too, useful plugins have been developed, which are designed to facilitate the fight against fake and manipulative videos.

Metadata

Metadata2go

Check photo and video metadata online.


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FotoForensics

Image forensics tool.


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Jhead

Removing EXIF/Metadata.


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Wolfram|Alpha

Does a lot of things, including weather forecasts for the day and location.


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Irfanview

Windows-based metadata extraction software, confidential information.


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SpiderPig

Metadata extraction. Command line interface and scripting. Knowledge of web technologies required.


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Splunk

Metadata extraction. Report on analysis and presentation of estimates. Not easy to use. Not easy to configure and deploy.


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ExifPurge

It is a portable program for removing coordinates, location and other technical information from multiple images at once.


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Forensically Image Forensics

A web-based image analysis tool. Can easily recognize fake or doctored images. Publicly available, information is not private.


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Face recognition

Sensity

Checks if the face has been heavily altered or tampered with.


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VGG Face Finder (VFF) Engine

This is an application that serves as a web engine to find faces in a given image dataset.


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PimEyes

Face search system and reverse image search. A very useful and practical tool.


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Image

VGG Image Classification Engine

It is a web application that serves as a web engine for performing image classification queries.


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PureRef

Working area of the image; allows you to organize images into groups, arrange them, etc.


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VGG Image Search Engine (VISE)

This standalone program can be used to reverse image search a large image collection.


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Google Lens / Desktop

Google Lens in your browser is better than Google Image reverse search.


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Cleanup.pictures

A web tool for quickly removing objects from an image.


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Various

Fdupes

Find exact matches for duplicate files.


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RenRot

Renames image files to their original names.


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Search4faces

Search people’s profiles by photos.


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SunCalc

You can make a rough estimate of the time of day using the direction of the shadow.


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Сalculator IPVM

Tool for simulating a camera view (for geolocation).


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