In this world where “fake news” is screamed at you every day, how do you really know if the news is real or of the photo hasn’t been altered? This interesting topic came to us from ABC in their article, “Fake news, hoax images: How to spot a digitally altered photo from the real deal.”
We speak of metadata frequently and it is constantly referred to in topics about security, private information, etc. But metadata is also the key to determining reality in regards to photos.
Digitally altered images are everywhere, spreading like wildfire on news sites and social media. Sometimes the alteration is obvious, sometimes not so much. It is then time to look at the image metadata – the information that’s added to the photo by the camera. It often includes the make of the camera, time of day the photo was snapped and GPS coordinates. It has to be an enabled feature on your camera though. However, if the image was opened in Photoshop and re-saved, it will tell you as well.
Look to the metadata when in doubt.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
