[LINK] Can Israelis edit EXIF headers?

andrew clarke mail at ozzmosis.com
Fri Jun 4 18:21:22 AEST 2010


On Fri 2010-06-04 11:54:21 UTC+1000, Stilgherrian (stil at stilgherrian.com) wrote:

> On 04/06/2010, at 11:40 AM, Birch, Jim wrote:
> > Stil wrote:
> >> I've confirmed, at least, that the test of that image's EXIF headers
> >> show it as having been taken in 2006. Of course we're assuming the
> >> camera had its clock set accurately, but presumably the military are
> >> good at that sort of thing?
> > 
> > Why do those bulletproof jackets bring Catch-22 to mind?
> 
> Hah. I see where you're going there.
> 
> Now digging further for Crikey, I have since discovered that the
> camera's clock being wrong is the more likely theory. The image in
> question was taken with a Nikon D2Xs and timestamped 7 February 2006.
> But that model camera wasn't even announced until 1 June 2006. Given
> that internal batteries last ~ a few years and camera clocks reset to
> the year of manufacture, there's your Occam's Razor right there.

I have a Fujifilm Finepix S5600 and a Kodak C1013.  With both cameras,
if you remove the rechargeable AAs batteries for several hours (eg.
overnight) the internal clock will stop working.  When the batteries
are reinserted and the cameras turned on, the user is prompted to set
the clock (with them defaulting to January 1, 2005 & January 1, 2009
respectively, IIRC).

I don't think either camera has internal batteries - just a small
capacitor to keep the clock going for a short time.

The EXIF metadata (including the timestamp) of a JPEG can be edited
using software, eg. JHead:

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Regards
Andrew



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