It’s very comprehensive had I claimed the photo was taken, say, last week in Swanage, it would be very simple to disprove. In such situations, EXIF readers such as Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer allow you upload or enter the URL of an image and view its metadata.īelow is the EXIF data of a photograph I took of a bus crash in Poole in August 2014. This information can be very useful if you’re suspicious of the creator’s account of the content’s origins. Photos, videos and audio taken with digital cameras and smartphones contain Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) information: this is vital metadata about the make of the camera used, and the date, time and location the media was created. The thumbnails can also be used in a reverse image search to find web pages containing the video, offering a quick and powerful method for identifying older versions or uses of the same video. If multiple versions of the same video are hosted on YouTube, the date enables you to identify the earliest upload. This information – which isn’t readily accessible via YouTube itself – enables you to launch a two-pronged verification search. Once you’ve entered the video’s URL, this tool will extract the clip’s upload time and all associated thumbnail images. When watching the latest viral video on YouTube, it’s important to be on the look-out for “scrapes”: a scrape is an old video, which has been downloaded from YouTube and re-uploaded by someone who fraudulently claims to be the original eyewitness, or asserts that the video depicts a new event.Īmnesty International has a simple but incredibly useful tool called YouTube DataViewer. Soon, one reported back: “Google Image Search says the photo is from 2012”. When a link to the story was posted to Reddit, sceptical users swiftly took to Google to query it. As the screenshot below shows, the “ISIS refugee” story could be debunked in less than a second. Both of the most popular services, Google Images and TinEye, found pages containing this image dating back to mid-2012. Not only is a reverse image search one of the simplest verification tools, it’s also the one that showed the “leaked” ISIS refugee photo was a fake. Outlined below are six free, simple tools that any curious news reader can use to verify digital media. Fortunately, there are a few relatively effective verification techniques, which do not require specialist knowledge or costly software. It’s no longer enough to read the news – now, we want to understand the processes behind it. But ordinary people are also starting to take a more sophisticated approach to the content they view online.

Jeffreys exif data viewer