What comes back
- Where it was taken. Many cameras and nearly every phone write GPS coordinates into the file. When they are there, the report gives the coordinates and puts them on a map.
- When it was taken. The capture timestamp, which is written by the camera and is frequently different from the file's modification date. Where they disagree, that difference is the finding.
- What took it. Camera make and model, lens, and the exposure settings. Enough to tell a phone photo from a camera photo, and to tell whether two photos came from the same device.
- Whether it was edited. Editing software leaves its name in the file. Beyond that, an error-level analysis highlights regions that have been recompressed differently from the rest of the image, which is what a pasted-in area tends to look like.
What it is good for
Three situations, mostly.
Checking a photo somebody sent you. A listing photo whose capture date is four years old and whose location is a different country is not a photo of the thing being sold to you.
Checking your own photos before you post them. If your holiday photos carry your home coordinates because you took a few test shots in the kitchen, you would rather find that out here.
Deciding whether an image has been altered. The error-level view will not prove a forgery, but it will show you where to look.
What it will not tell you
- Where else the image appears online. Wrong module, no exceptions.
- Who is in the photograph. There is no face recognition here, deliberately.
- Anything at all, if the metadata was stripped. Every major social platform removes it on upload, so a photo saved from Instagram or sent through WhatsApp usually arrives blank. That is a finding in itself: it tells you the file has been through something.
What happens to the file
The image is analysed and the file is discarded. It is not kept, not used to train anything and not shown to anybody. The report that stays in your history holds the findings and the file name, not the picture.
Up to 15 MB, in the formats a camera or a phone produces.
Common questions
Why is my photo's report empty?
Almost certainly because the metadata was stripped before you got the file. Social platforms and messaging apps do that on upload. Try the original off the camera or the phone if you have it.
Does a GPS coordinate mean the photo was definitely taken there?
It means the device recorded that position when the shutter fired. Devices can be wrong and metadata can be edited, which is why the report shows the raw values and the editing traces side by side rather than a conclusion.
Can it tell me if an image was made by AI?
Not reliably, and it does not claim to. Some generators write their name into the file and the report will show that. Most of the tells people look for are in the picture, not the file.