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 You now know the photo was taken on an iPhone 3G running out of
date software on June 19, 2013 at 12:56PM at a specific location.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.
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