Image Provenance — Why Ownership Breaks Online
How to establish, verify, and maintain the chain of custody for digital images — from capture to publication.
Related Experiments
Hands-on tests and reproducible data.
What Instagram Actually Does to Your Photos: A Pixel-Level Analysis
We uploaded sealed images to Instagram and examined exactly how the platform processes them — JPEG quality, resolution limits, metadata stripping, and chroma subsampling changes.
10 min · Mar 1, 2026
How Every Major Platform Strips Your Image Metadata
A systematic study of metadata preservation across 12 platforms — Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Discord, Reddit, Imgur, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
12 min · Mar 3, 2026
Related Guides
Deep dives and practical advice.
Why Image Metadata Fails: The Hidden Crisis in Digital Provenance
EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata is stripped by every major platform. Learn why metadata-based provenance is fundamentally broken and what alternatives exist.
7 min · Mar 4, 2026
How to Prove Image Authorship in 2026: A Complete Guide
From timestamps to blockchain to pixel watermarks — every method for proving you created an image, ranked by effectiveness and practicality.
8 min · Mar 4, 2026
Why Screenshots Break Image Provenance (And What You Can Do About It)
Screenshots are the #1 way images spread without attribution. Here's why they destroy every form of provenance except pixel-level watermarks.
5 min · Mar 4, 2026