How do I spot fake pictures on websites | Your complete guide to detecting photo spoofing
You may be wondering how I can detect fake images on the Internet and social media sites in particular, as advances in artificial intelligence have facilitated the creation of complex fake images, videos and audio recordings, and in the meantime misinformation is spreading on social media.
The fake photos are frequently re-circulated and have been debunked. Reverse Image Search is a simple and effective way to find out how an image was previously used, and unlike regular internet searches in which keywords are specified, reverse image searches on Google or TinEye can search for the same or similar images in a huge database.
Digital photos often contain:
Rich metadata that can provide clues to its source and authenticity.
Metadata is data about the data.
The metadata of the digital photo includes the camera make and model, and camera settings such as aperture size, exposure time, date and time the photo was taken, the GPS location where the photo was taken, and more.
The importance of the date, time and location markers is self-evident.
Other tags may have a similar direct interpretation, for example image editors may present a tag identifying the program, or date and time markers incompatible with other tags.
Several markers provide information about camera settings, and the overall discrepancy between the image properties contained in these settings and the actual characteristics of the image provides evidence that the image has been tampered with, for example ...
The markers for exposure time and aperture size provide a qualitative measure of light levels in the photographed scene, and a short exposure time and small aperture indicate a scene with high exposure levels captured during the day.
While a long exposure time and a large aperture refer to a scene with low light levels captured at night or indoors, the metadata is stored in the image file and can be easily extracted using various programs, however some online services exclude a lot of the image's metadata, so the absence of Metadata is not rare, and when the metadata is intact it can be very helpful.
How to spot fake pictures on the Internet:
Google is the largest search engine and has a huge database on the web, and this makes it the best image investigator to verify the original image when performing a reverse search, as shown in the video below, and you just have to drag and drop the image or upload it from your phone through a specific browser and place it on Desktop mode will provide a list of sites hosting the same image,
Google Reverse Search provides you with the advantage of searching for fake images by providing the date on which the image was displayed and published, and the features mentioned above to discover modifications to the images.
And Google Reverse Search is not the only reverse search engine on the market, there are a few alternatives to search for images such as:
- Bing Image Matching - Currently only available in the US.
- Yandex Image [with facial recognition]
- TinEye - their database is not as large as Google but is useful with that science.
Always check with an alternative source in Google News, all sites included in Google News follow the stringent quality guidelines for Google News, and their goal is to organize all world news and make it accessible to its users, while providing the best possible experience for those looking for useful and timely news information, and also preparing Image Edited is one of the most popular and best sites for detecting fake photos and manipulating images.
