Geolocating images can be difficult. Sometimes the way to identify a location is not immediately obvious, but you can start with what you do know and then close the gaps to find out things that you don’t know and gradually get closer to your objective. For example you might be fairly sure about the country …
Why are all these people parking their cars at a swimming pool in the middle of lockdown? This was the question Lars Wienand posted for yesterday’s Quiztime challenge. Here’s the photo: To solve this quiz we need to do two things. First we need to know where this is, and secondly we need to know …
Ever since I started blogging about image geolocation I’ve tried to write about methods and techniques that make solving these kind of puzzles more structured and systematic. In my professional career I was (until recently) a criminal investigator so it was helpful for me to transfer habits and methodologies from traditional investigation to the subject …
Extract, Research, Verify: Quiztime 6th October 2020. Read More »
During lockdown I’ve spent a lot of my evenings trying to improve my coding and data science skills with Datacamp. As I’ve tried to apply my new found knowledge to real world projects I’ve come to learn that about 80% of working with data is cleaning it up and making it tidy before you can …
I started writing up this Quiztime post almost two months ago but then life got very busy and I never managed to finish it. This was a really fun quiz by Lars Wienand and the solution was not as obvious as I first thought it was so a little extra digging was required. Here’s the …
Lost In The Woods & Translation Troubles – Quiztime 10th March 2020 Read More »
Not all image-based OSINT work is about geolocation. It is always helpful to know where a photo was taken, but knowing when an image was taken can be just as important when trying to verify it. Is this a COVID-hit Italian hospital, or the aftermath of an earthquake in Croatia? Are these food packages left …
Using photographs for OSINT purposes is not new but almost all work of this kind mostly focuses on the visual content of images. Much less well known is the usefulness of image meta- and file data for research purposes. Beyond the visual appearance of an image there is often additional information hidden within an image …
In OSINT we make use of the wealth of information that is now available to us, but so often it becomes the case that there is too much information for us to process effectively. It’s easy to drown in a sea of data and you can quickly find yourself with twenty browser tabs open having …
Using Gap Analysis For Smarter OSINT – Quiztime 4th March 2020 Read More »
January has been a busy month both personally and professionally so I haven’t been able to take part in as many Quiztime challenges as I’d like to. Fortunately I had time to try Sector035’s Thursday Quiz. Sector035 posted not one but two photos. All we had to do was establish where exactly they were taken. …
How much information is there in a photograph? There is always more than you think. I learned recently that when miltary intelligence officers receive their training, they are given a photo that does not seem to contain much detail but they are required to produce twenty pieces of intelligence from it: Who is in the …