Useful tools for researching whether images and videos are fake

Bill Statler

Copyright © 2015 — Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Another viral image or video? Beyond checking Snopes, sometimes you may want to do a little investigation on your own. And this article by Pete Brown will point you at several very useful tools to help:

Six easy ways to tell if that viral story is a hoax

Here are the tools he lists (mostly posted here so I can find them myself!):

Google Images (reverse image search)

TinEye (reverse image search)

Amnesty International's Youtube DataViewer (displays upload date/time, thumbnails, and convenient reverse image search links)

Jeffrey Friedl's Exif Viewer (displays metadata stored by digital cameras in image files)

FotoForensics (analyzes JPG and PNG files for evidence of photoshopping)

WolframAlpha (a general-purpose knowledge search, especially useful for questions like "weather in [cityname] at [time] on [date]", so that you can check if conditions shown in an image or video match reality)

Google Maps (especially the Street View function) and Google Earth (which offers historical imagery)