Metadata means “information about information”. It's kind of like the back of a postcard – the front shows an image, the back shows information about it, perhaps someone telling you about where they are.

Metadata works in the exact same way, but for digital content. Attached to every file, there is information about it – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But what’s neat is that when we take a photo or a video with our phones, it often gathers location data. This is unless you’ve inactivated this service, which in my experience most people haven’t.

This means that if you look at the metadata for much visual content, you can actually find the coordinates of where it was shot. But and this is an important limitation: almost all social media services remove metadata when you upload something to their platforms. So, if you find a photo on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Telegram, there unfortunately won’t be any metadata.

But if you receive an image through email, SMS, a cloud service or uploaded in its original form to a website, then there’s a good chance the metadata will be there. And when it is, it’s often a treasure trove.

Let's look at this photo, which seems to be taken from a hill overlooking a city. One way to identify where it was taken, could be to use reverse image search (live demonstration).

But a shortcut could be to use a tool such as Jimpl, to extract the metadata. (live demonstration)

There are other ways to extract metadata from other file types and depending on what material you’re working with it’s often easy to find the right tools and methods. But one last important thing I want you to be aware of, is that metadata can be manipulated.

In my experience, this is rather rare – there are plenty examples of even professional propagandists who’ve simply forgotten that the metadata is there – but it’s essential to be aware of. Therefore, even if metadata is found, it’s not certain evidence. Just another piece to the puzzle that we’re trying to lay.

With that said, let's get into the exercises.

Exercise 1: What’s the name of this water mass, and when was the picture taken? Go down into Google Street View and find the exact photo location.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jqVugBBeZocfoKrV9mUJPlt_FQ95KHaA/view?usp=drive_link

Exercise 2: Can you figure out the exact apartment this picture seems to be taken from? It’s enough if you can point it out on Google Street View.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uXey9bpddBHvpa6_t1H8SuLiQtG4FypA/view?usp=drive_link

References:

Jimpl: https://jimpl.com/

OSINT Telegraph: The Importance of Metadata in Open-Source Intelligence

https://osinttelegraph.com/the-importance-of-metadata-in-open-source-intelligence/

A Thorough Guide To Photo Metadata (written for photographers)

https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/photo-metadata