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.
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.
The story behind Vaultify — a father building a steganography platform in memory of his son Huey, who lost his sight at four and dreamed of photos that carry hidden stories.
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.
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 …
