Polaroid Cameras, Digital Cameras and locations of photos

Hi, all!

Hopefully someone is an expert in cameras because Google is simply giving me too much information and I am having a difficult time narrowing it down.

This story I am working on, an investigator discovers a compromising picture of a child in the home of a suspected child molester. This individual does not have access to the child, he just has the photograph. The investigator wants to find the location the photo was taken in.

[I doubt this technique would work for old fashioned polaroid photos because the technology did not exist in the past. If I am wrong, please let me know!!]

However, I remember reading in a news magazine (Time, MacLeans, Newsweek, etc) that there was a situation with digital photographs where a member of the military (probably USA but not sure) had taken a photo on a military base with helicopters in the background and posted it on his Facebook, then instrugents launched a missile attack on the base and destroyed some helicopters. There was an investigation and it turned out that the photo that was posted to the soldier's Facebook was taken from a digital camera and the GPS information was encoded into the photo. The instrugents were able to extract that data, decode it, from the photo posted to Facebook.

Is this accurate? That photographs taken with a digital camera are encoded with the geographical location of where the photo is taken? If so, is this a feature that is standardized and cannot be switched off? Or is it something that people can turn on and off?

As I understand digital photographs on digital cameras they can be uploaded to any computer and people can trace the ISP address but this only gives you the computer's location, not the actual geographical location where the photo was taken. I want my character to be able to trace the photograph so he can rescue the victim(s).

Many thanks to all!

 

I actually saw/heard similar information recently on the Netflix documentary Don't Fuck with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. The simple answer is yes, digital photos can carry a bevy of metadata to include the physical location where the photo was taken. BTW, that word, metadata, that's the word you want for your continued Googling pleasure.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-23/what-your-photos-and-their-metadata-say-about-you/8642630

 

I'm not certain but location should be tagged due to active wifi and gps. There are ways to turn them off. Each camera has different settings. There are also ways to remove the data from a photo afterwards. In old polaroid, indeed you didn't get the location. In new models, I have no clue.

 

Well, GPS info can only be acquired if the camera has wireless and GPS receiving capabilities. On most Android devices, these can be switched off (required for some flights, for example).

I'm a little dubious about the photo uploaded to Facebook though. Facebook doesn't, IIRC, display the original photo that was uploaded, but a reencoded version of it. I could be wrong about this though.

In the olden days, the location would have to be identified manually with experts looking at whatever clues the photo could provide. There were ways to do this, not everything just relies on computers. Basically, people brainstorming.

 

Truth being stranger than fiction, there's this:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/10/14/stalker-found-pop-star-by-searching-eyes-reflections-on-google-maps/

Wouldn't work with Polaroids.

 

Could possibly still work with Polaroids. Film is able to hold a ridiculous amount of detail and not only do Polaroid/Instant Films have much finer grain than most, but they're typically much larger in size than most consumer films. If the camera that took the picture has a decent lens, and whoever scans the transparency uses good procedure, you could likely get an equivalent resolution of ~80MP.

 

Hi,

As the others said, you indeed need a meta data file which is based on GPS function, activated on your reflex (Polaroid cameras can't).
And the criminal are usually aware of this, so it won't sound really authentic.

But, I have a suggestion for you to deal with that problem :

1. The suspect used an argentic/polaroid/digital camera where the date is marked somewhere (more difficult to hide/desactivate).
2. He also carry his cell phone in his pocket.
3. Using a criminal investigation warrant, the inspector ask the cell phone provider to have access to the emiting data from the phone of the guy, on that date.
4. Using triangularization, he determine a range where... there is only one house (the one he is looking for).

 

To have a Geographical Info on a photo you would need to have some kind of GPS location equipment within the camera. I don't know of any stranded camera to be fitted with such a devise . Phones and tablets do have the equipment and you can load photos to the cloud , I suspect all the info regrading location will be tagged on to it. The same way your calls are . The ISP address is your computers number for using the internet . Files loaded or unloaded directly don't use the ISP . But files sent over the internet can be traced back to your computer Via your ISP.

 

Not quite. The IP address will be the address of the wireless connection used to upload the data, or the IP address used by the mobile phone network to upload it, if uploading via mobile data. That IP will be dynamic, i.e. it will change regularly and not exclusive to your particular device.

 

If it registers a MAC address, however, that will be exclusive to that device. Or at least specific to whatever network device was being used at the time.

 

Not true, MAC addresses can easily be shared/spoofed. I worked for a small company where every single one of our servers had the same MAC address. It's pretty common now because servers are mostly virtualized and creating new servers is usually just a process of literally copying an entire computer and just altering the IP address, MAC stays the same.

Anyway, exif data contains a lot of information, and where the picture was taken is usually one of them. If you want to see exactly what happens when you take a picture, just hook your phone or camera to any computer and navigate it like a disk drive. You'll find the raw images in some folder then you can look at them. On Windows, you can right click > Properties > Details and on Mac it's Get Info > More Info. Almost all cameras do this now a as GPS receivers are fairly cheap and the API is open. By default, I'd bet any camera costing more than $100 has one and will store location data by default.

Someone mentioned wifi. This is not in any way needed, wifi can be used to help pinpoint locations in densely packed cities where satellite signals might be bouncing off of buildings or something, but it's not needed. I'd actually be surprised if putting your phone in "airplane mode" turns of GPS. GPS doesn't transmit anything, it's just a receiver, so I don't see why it would have to be shut off, it's literally impossible to interfere with anything. This is also why GPS works completely off of the grid.

As for photo sharing sites or services like Facebook. 99% of them will take the original photo and do a crapton of processing on it, compressing it, stripping private data... I don't think you can just pull a raw image from Facebook, I doubt they even keep them once a processed version is created.


If it's just a picture, no exif data, I suppose you'd be forced to just key into something visible in the background and do regular detective work plus maybe some maths to figure out where it is. There are two major problems with this. One is that you'll have to recognize at least one object in frame. It'd be very jarring and just come off as lazy. "Oh, I recognize that old barn, it's twelve miles outside of town in this arbitrary direction that for some reason I know." Knowledge ex machina. The other is that for any type of triangulation and maths, why is your character suddenly a math wiz? I'm friends with a number of police officers, and no offense to any officers who might read this, but I doubt they even know what SOHCAHTOA is, let alone how to do more complicated stuff like translations.

 

Literally all the metadata(EXIF, etc.) can be spoofed if you know how. If they have the knowledge to spoof a MAC or IP address, then it's probably safe to assume the rest of that data would be compromised as well. Incidentally, my Nikon records Latitude and Longitude in it's data even though it doesn't have GPS capabilities, but it defaults to somewhere in Germany for whatever reason. EXIFToolGUI is what I use to edit all that.

 

I mentioned wifi as one of the ways you can upload, not the only one.

As far as GPS is concerned, aeroplane mode disables GPS in the last few phones I had, so I assume it's the same with Android based cameras.

 

I remember reading some time ago that 'the aspies on 4-chan' had figured out the location of a photograph of the sky that showed nothing but maybe a telephone pole and 2 crossed vapor trails. The photo must have included time and date info (it was digital). Apparently a group of them cross-referenced all flight info for that day and time and figured out the exact location where two vapor trails could have crossed at that angle. They even identified the exact spot he was standing at and which way he was facing and pinpointed the telephone pole. I think they used Google Maps for some of it. So yeah, it can indeed be done without exif data etc, and in fact is a lot more fun and exciting the old-fashioned way––makes for much better drama than just looking up exif data, it's actually solving a mystery Holmes-style.

The same group of aspies on 4-chan also figured out who the infamous bike lock attacker was from video or a picture showing his shoes and the bone structure around his eyes (he was wearing a ski mask). They somehow turned up pictures of a professor from the campus wearing the same shoes and whose eye structure looked the same, and on the strength of that evidence police searched his home and found the bike lock and backpack he had been wearing in the video. I think it was already suspected that he was faculty at the college, which makes it slightly less incredible.

 

Wow....!!!

Thanks everyone! I really wasn't expecting this to get much attention, especially not 14 replies.

Maybe the Facebook story was something that a reporter took creative liberties with. I'm positive that I read something like that, the problem is WHERE did I read it? I would assume Maclean's magazine but.....bah. We'll chalk it up to a reporter with an overactive imagination.

With regards to finding the physical location that a photograph was taken in, in order for this to work the photo has to be outside and there have to be visible landmarks in the photo probably a minimum of two but more would be better and then the investigator needs to be a math wiz or have access to a math wiz. I remember an episode of "Numb3rs" figuring out the location of a photograph from the physical clues in the photo. I'm also pretty sure that US Special Forces used these techniques to locate bin Laden and other terrorists. Local law enforcement is not going to have access to National Security resources which is what would be required to perform this type of analysis.

[I would ***LOVE IT*** if a fraction of the money devoted to fighting terrorism was spent on fighting child abuse. I'd say that 'child abuse' is terrorism! It's terrorism against an innocent child(ren), let's spend a few billion on the problem and WIPE IT OUT!! ---- Sorry, it gets my blood boiling. Rant over.]



I was thinking that the villain would have a room in the basement of a house somewhere set up as a "studio" and take the photos there. In this case it would not be possible to gather clues to the location from the details in the background of the photograph. This is why I was hoping with technology nowadays that the location of the photo was somehow encoded into the photo.

Historically, what the people who investigated images of child abuse would do is they would examine the photos for clues as to the location. They would examine details in the background like for example if there is furniture in the photo, where was that type of furniture made, sold, how old is it? If there was bedding such as a pillow case or sheets, what was the pattern on the sheets? What store(s) sold those sheets? When? Etc, etc. Hopefully the investigator would be able to get something like such and such an item was only sold at Big Bubba's General Goods store in Wherever city in the state of Wherever and this would give the investigator a starting point for on the ground investigations. This never happens in real life. In real life, the sheets are probably sold internationally (Canada and the USA) by Wal-Mart and have been sold for ten years. Tracking down all of the people who purchased those particular sheets by credit card or debit card....very difficult....cash purchases? Impossible. And that's not accounting for the events where the sheets were given away via gift or donations. Usually the examination would only give the investigator some insight into the type of offender they were pursuing. Once caught, they could prove the offender took photos a, b, c but perhaps not photo d because it didn't match the offender's style or because the offender did not have access to that location in photo d while they can prove the offender had access to the location that photos a, b, and c were taken in.

So other than the physical items in the photo that *might* be traced back to a purchaser, the other thing the investigator wants to do is look at the child's features so that s/he can be identified. However, this is VERY difficult work to do because the focus of these photos is the child's private parts. When 75% plus of the photo is of the child's private parts, it's scary to imagine the effects on a investigator of staring at that photo for hours and hours, trying to memorize the features of the child so they can be identified in other photos and hopefully in reports of missing children. It is a LOT better nowadays when investigators can remove the disturbing parts of the photo via digital manipulation and leave just the child's face and the background of the photo for the investigator to focus on.

I really can't see a lot of people having the stomach for this type of work. I know I would never be able to do it. I'm actually thinking of having my good guys enlist the help of a convicted child molester and having the convict be the one to examine the photos. It's the only way I can see that would preserve my character's sanity. I'm thinking it's comparable to Operation Paperclip in the aftermath of World War Two where the Americans offered citizenship to German scientists who could help them win the space race. Some of those individuals were guilty of crimes against humanity and the American government gave them citizenship....

Oh, the last way to find the offender is to find the child and interview that child to find out what was happening, where was it happening, and who was doing it. Kind of hard to do with privacy laws and whatnot. Plus you're not likely to know when the photo was taken. The child could be 6 years old in the photo but if the photo was taken 10 years ago, that child is now 16 and looks a LOT different than the child in the photo. In the past when kids all went to school and all had school pictures taken....if you had the human resources to pore over thousands of yearbooks of children *MAYBE* you could hit the jackpot. Then again, some kids skipped (ill, didn't want to have a picture taken) picture day and others were home-schooled so....

Maybe facial recognition has some applications here....?

Yah, I know - "you're the writer. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be plausible." I'm going down that road now.

Thanks again everyone!!

 

Isn't that more or less Silence of the Lambs?

 

^ Of course––"It takes a thief to catch a thief" and variations on it have been done many times. Every plot has. Complete originality of plot isn't the goal, just find ways to make it interesting and engaging (Not really saying this to you Naomasa, I know you understand it already, just throwing it out there).

 

Oh, yah, I know the "use a thief to catch a thief" trick. I was really trying to avoid it. I absolutely guarantee it should be possible to do everything I am trying to have my character do accomplish

*with technology ONE DAY.*

We're not at that point yet, unfortunately. Some day.....

 

...or you could do what CSI does and just make the technology up.