Journal karniv0re's Journal: Gleaning Information With Exif 1
While digging through my past, there are points in my life that are black holes. These are problematic. I joined Gmail in 2004, Facebook in 2005, and basically everything after that is recorded in some form of digits. But prior to that is proving to be a challenge. I had a MySpace, Live Journal, Yahoo!, and Hotmail account dating back to 1997, but all of them have been obliterated. I bet even the NSA would have trouble coming up with data on me prior to 2004. So this leaves me stumped.
One thing I did have was a digital camera. And I'm not braindead, so I remember things that happened when I took those pictures. So, with the power of Exif and the "Date/Time Original" field, I'm actually able to do a little detective work. But there's a catch. That requires you to have first set the date time on the camera, something I never saw the value in back in 2003 when I first got my Olympus C40 Zoom (A WHOPPING 2.8x ZOOM and 4.0 MEGAPIXELS!!!).
Side note: I'm really stoked to see this bad boy again: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusc40z Sheeeeeiitttt.
So anyway, having not set the date/time, I was left with a bogus date. The time doesn't matter much for this experiment. All I want is the date so I can put events on a post-dated calendar.
But I have one thing that technology doesn't have: memory! Ok, that's unfair, but you know what I mean. I can use my memories of when the pictures were taken around a specific date (i.e. my birthday) and adjust from there. So, upon finding a specific picture taken on my birthday that contained a date within Exif, I just had to do the addition. Plug for my favorite online date/time tool: http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadded.html
Once that was done, I just needed to adjust all the other dates and I've got my events.
Surprisingly effective for such stupid simple shit. Now, I'm facing the problem that I've deleted a shitton of pictures somehow, and I'm not sure I can get them back easily. I was looking into Autopsy, but it wants an image and I'm not sure I can get it that... But for now, I'll take my small victory.
By the way, beware of that Exif data, particularly if you are sending something you think is anonymous. Your best bet is to take a screenshot of the picture and send that, assuring you aren't transferring any Exif data, thereby revealing yourself. That is unrelated to this post, but it's a thought.
exiftool (Score:2)
Before uploading I use exiftool to strip anything from a picture I don't want anyone to get unnecessary information from:
$ exiftool -all= foo.jpg