Lastly, I would like to show you how you can uncover or find metadata information in images.
Metadata is information that are stored within an image, video, or a document that gives extra information
about this file.
You might be able to find the creation and modification date, author usernames, GPS coordinates,
or the device that took that image.
Now, we have already covered how we can find metadata in an image in the search engine Osint section.
But this time we are going to take a different approach.
Please keep in mind that most social media platforms strip metadata when uploading users pictures and
videos.
So if you have downloaded a picture from Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, then you will not be able
to find metadata because they are already removed by the website.
But some websites do not strip metadata from files, videos, or images when uploading them to their
website.
So if you were able to find a person's website, then you always want to check whether they have stripped
all metadata from the images that they have uploaded to their website.
In addition to that, some forums do not strip metadata from files, so whenever somebody uploads a
certain picture, metadata will not be stripped and you will be able to gather information about their
device and maybe the author or the username.
Now here we have some examples that I found on GitHub.
In your case, you might be able to find a picture on a website or on a forum.
So what you want to do is just right mouse click and then save the image on your desktop, for example.
And then you want to go to a website like metadata to go.
I'll put the link in the resources of this lecture, and then you want to click on View metadata.
And then you want to upload the picture that you have downloaded.
And this will analyze the picture to check whether there is any metadata.
And as you can see, here are the information that we were able to find.
We can scroll down and see that this is the phone that took the image.
We can also see that the software, we can copy it and search for it on Google to get more information.
We can also scroll down and see when this image has been taken.
And in my opinion this is very important, especially in legal cases.
You can scroll down more and here you can find the coordinates where this picture has been taken.
There is another website called Exif tools that will show you the metadata of a picture.
So you want to click on browse and then select the picture.
And then click on upload file.
And then it will analyze the file that you have uploaded.
We can scroll down and here are the coordinates.
We can click on View Larger maps to view where this image has been taken.
And it were taken right here.
The last thing that I'm going to show you is a browser extension that you can add it to your Firefox
or Chrome browser.
It's called Exif viewer, and then you want to click on Add to Firefox and then add again.
And now every time you find a picture and you would like to see whether it has metadata or not, for
example, this one, instead of downloading it you just have to right mouse click and then you'll find
this option called Exif viewer.
You want to click on it and then you will find the metadata of this picture.
So we can see the model or the camera model which is Nokia 8.3.
We can scroll down and find the coordinates of this picture.
And you can open the coordinates on Google Maps, Bing or in this map.
So in this lecture you have learned how you can read metadata from any image by downloading the image
and then uploading it to a metadata service.
Or you can view the metadata using a browser extension.