Building Your Tool Chest: Image Tools

Building Your Tool Chest is a series devoted to the review and analysis of tools that assist with social media and open source research and analytics. 

The world of social media and online content is becoming increasingly visual. Photos and videos are becoming the primary vehicle used by many to communicate their thoughts and ideas with others. Gone are the walls of text once prevalent in the era of Geocities. Today, online content generally focuses on conveying messages with little text in a manner designed to impact users in a big way.

This trend is exemplified by Facebook’s recent announcement it was transitioning to a more visual news feed. The change was reportedly prompted by the growing popularity of other social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Additionally, Google recently added a carousel design to its search returns which show photos related to search terms. These changes to a more visual culture has made the analysis of images during social media research much more important.

Analysts must be able to draw conclusions from the content of the photos themselves. More importantly, analysts must equip their toolkit with applications that visualize the metadata behind photos and give users the ability to search for images across the Internet. There are a variety of individual services that perform these functions such as TinEye and metapicz. However, there is a Google Chrome application which combines a variety of these image analysis tools into a single, simple interface: Image Tools.

Image Tools combines applications that extract exchangeable image file format (exif) data and provide reverse image search services together in a single right-click interface. With this application, analysts can gain insight into the data behind photos and determine if they are used elsewhere. The two main features of the tool are exif viewers and reverse image searches.

Exif Viewers

Exif data is a structured data set embedded into most digital images by the device that captured it. Certain tools can extract latent information from images for further analysis. To detail this concept, we will examine the exif data behind our Project Manager’s stylish sunglasses:

 Using Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer, you can visualize an abundance of information. You now know the photo was taken on an iPhone 3G running out of date software on June 19, 2013 at 12:56PM at a specific location. This information is vital when building timelines and placing people at certain locations. The exif tools featured in Image Tools also allow users to see a map of the area where the photo was taken. These latent details give analysts greater insight into the subject of their investigation.

 However, there are limits exif data. This data is best extracted from images downloaded from the Internet and email attachments. When an image has been uploaded to a site like Facebook or Imgur, the rich exif metadata is generally removed from the photo. Ultimately, the ability to extract this data depends on the website hosting the image and whether users or the site have scrubbed the metadata from the photo.

Reverse Image Searches

Reverse image searches are valuable when you are attempting to identify online accounts maintained by a single individual or the original source of an image. The toolset available in Image Tools allows you to right click on an image and search for sites where that image was used before. This saves a great deal of effort when trying to build out an individual’s online footprint.

To show how this works, we will use a reverse image search to identify accounts belonging to a member of the Syrian Electronic Army. Once you identify one account maintained by the person of interest, you can right click on their profile image and perform a reverse image search. The search for the image below returned thirteen results.

From the results, you can to identify YouTube and LinkedIn accounts. Image Tools gives you a jump-start on building out this individual’s digital footprint by helping you identify additional accounts within minutes. From there, you can continue to build out this individual’s network based upon the other data found on these profiles.

Without facial recognition capabilities, the average profile photo does not fare so well in a reverse image search. This method works best when the individual’s avatar is somewhat unique. However, you should always run a reverse image search because there may be relevant results. Using these searches can be valuable time savers when trying to identify where avatars may have been used elsewhere.

Conclusion

The two sets of features detailed above show how analysts can exploit the growing image-centric nature of online content when conducting their research. Image Tools is a great all-in-one app for viewing exif data and searching through disparate data sources to locate images. Every analyst’s toolkit should have a similar tool to investigate the data behind digital images. Thanks to exif data and reverse image searches, you can go beyond what it is in a photo by examining what is behind it as well.