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. Two compression signatures — quantisation tables and Huffman tables — survive every standard strip and reveal both the original encoder and whether the file was re-processed. Here’s what forensic analysis actually reads.
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.
