With This App You Can Finally Trust Photos Again
In a world where sophisticated Instagram filters enhance photos, and Snapchat filters can add makeup entirely, how does anyone know when an image is faked and when it isn’t? It’s tricky, but there is one app to fight photo fraud by giving the stamp of authenticity to pristine content.
The startup behind it called Truepic wants to use its patented photo verification technology to create “the world’s first digital photo notary,” TechCrunch reports.
How to use Truepic
Users download an iOS or Android app and take pictures or record videos. The app then checks to see if the content has changed and watermarks the untouched photo or video using time stamp, geocode, and other metadata such as the photographer, device, and location where the photo was taken. A copy is stored in the app’s digital storage and protected by a six-digit code, and the watermarked image can be exported anywhere.
What’s the point?
The ability to check your photos and videos offers several real-world applications . Users can use this app to build credibility when listing items on retail sites such as eBay or Craigslist, or even when listing places on a home rental site such as Airbnb. Or vice versa: consumers can search for a brand when viewing ads to be more confident in the photos they are viewing.
The stamp can also serve a noble purpose in dating apps that are known for fake accounts and cat-catching. Truepic technology captures highly altered images, so a watermark means the photo is genuine and not misleading. The time stamp confirms that the photo is a recent image of a person.
It won’t get rid of all fake photos.
Without other apps embedding Truepic into their platforms, scammers could theoretically take a screenshot and reuse the Truepic-verified image they stumble upon.
There are other tools (such as TinEye , Image Edited , FotoForensics, and ImgOps ) that allow people to check if an image has been modified or sourced from the internet. Users can also look forward to something simpler and more easily accessible: a reverse Google image search .
Obviously, there are several resources available for the person looking to manually check images. But there are a few third-party methods, if any, for those trying to authenticate their own photos and videos. This is where Truepic’s strength lies: it lets viewers know that content is real, unregistered and recent, and it also allows those sharing the content to add an authenticity badge to their photos and videos.