How to identify if a photo is fake or real?

The abundance of images on the internet and the ease with which anyone can appropriate most of them has made the deception in a fairly common practice, especially on social networks.

Build a profile with other people’s photos It is a practice that breaks the rules of network use, such as Facebook o Instagrambut the reality is that there are thousands of accounts made this way.

Many times, this is another way of commit crimes through the internet. Scammers often use photos “stolen” or generated by AI to obtain data and even money from their victims.

The first step to discover these profiles based on fake images is to determine its origin. Of course, you also have to apply common sense and distrust of everything that seems “too perfect”.

The first way to verify if the photo is original or if, on the contrary, it is a montage, is to make a reverse search. The tool is well at hand and it is Google Images.

From the PC or from a mobile phone with Android or iOS operating system (iPhone), you just have to upload the image in question, being careful to keep its original identification because Google will use it to find it in the vast universe of the internet. Another way: enter the web address of the site where the image is hosted.

Another way: enter the web address of the site where the image is hosted. In this case, you have to copy the url by right-clicking on the image. Then, copy that address into the text box and click Search by image.

A shortcut to carry out this process is to right-click on the image we want to search for and press the option Search image on Google. The results of that search will appear in a new tab.

Another tool, Google Lensallows you to track suspicious images. To do it with those that are hosted on the web, you just have to hold down the image and touch option Search with Google Lens.

A powerful detector of images that have been digitally modified or used without the permission of their authors is TinEye. The tool administrators ensure that the search is carried out among 71.3 billion images.

Its creators say that “you can send an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye uses image recognition technology instead of keywords, metadata or watermarks.”

They explain that “when an image is submitted to be found, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or fingerprint for it using image recognition and then compares this fingerprint with all the other images in our index to find matches”.

Of course, TinEye, as its creators acknowledge, is unable to find images posted on Facebook and Instagram; those found on password-protected pages or those that are not in the public domain or personal ones, located only on a device.