Photo and video forensic analysis, metadata, and authenticity
Whether you can read metadata from a received photo depends on the channel, not the tool. Email and AirDrop pass the file unchanged. Messaging apps re-encode — EXIF is gone, but a compression signature takes its place.
JPEG, WebP, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, and camera RAW files embed a firmware-generated thumbnail before any editing software has touched them. When software re-saves the image without updating the thumbnail, the mismatch is forensic evidence — one of 60+ forensic checks snapWONDERS runs automatically on every photo and video.
MakerNote is the manufacturer-written EXIF block that standard stripping tools typically leave intact — carrying lens serial numbers, shutter counts, burst UUIDs, and capture context that survives a standard privacy scrub. Its absence from a known device is equally revealing.
How to tell if a photo has been edited: forensic analysis reads compression signatures, manufacturer metadata baselines, and thumbnail mismatches across JPEG, WebP, PNG, and video.
Stripping EXIF metadata doesn’t make a photo anonymous. DQT quantisation tables and Huffman coding tables are baked into the JPEG compression — a permanent camera fingerprint that survives every standard metadata strip. Two of the 60+ forensic checks snapWONDERS reads from every image.
How I built the DQT encoder fingerprint database inside snapWONDERS — deriving libjpeg tables mathematically from the ISO standard, and running a live accumulation pipeline with a trust model to guard against faked metadata. And what this has to do with Vaultify.
A single geotagged photo shows where you were once. A few dozen shows where you live, work, and go every day — and most people are still sharing photos with full GPS data attached.
Every photo you take on your smartphone embeds a detailed record of where you were, what device you used, and exactly when — and most people have no idea how easy it is to read.
If you host a website, chances are you’re always vigilant about ensuring its security and protecting it from vulnerabilities. Even with exhaustive measures in place to bolster website security, the …
These days I’ve been busy on my latest project at snapWONDERS focused on our latest research development with AI and image processing. AI has the remarkable potential to enhance existing …
After some time away, the work is moving in a new direction. Hueyify has been paused. The story behind that is personal, and it’s told in full at kennethbspringer.au/our-story. The …
