01 · Product name
FotoForensics
A website for analyzing whether a digital photo was altered.
Published by Hacker Factor.
In short
FotoForensics is a free website from Hacker Factor for analyzing a digital photo. Dr. Neal Krawetz described the methods in a 2007 Black Hat talk, and the FAQ still points at that work. You submit a JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, or AVIF. The analysis is meant to show whether a picture was changed and, sometimes, how. It is a lead for a researcher. It is not a court opinion.
Product pricing strategy
02
Free
FotoForensics is free. You do not buy a seat to use what the project publishes.
Yes. The site this directory opened does not show a paid plan. You submit a picture in the browser.
Utility and features
03
The FotoForensics FAQ answers “what is this” by pointing back to Neal Krawetz’s 2007 Black Hat presentation, “A Picture’s Worth,” and the algorithms that followed. The site’s job is to let someone submit a picture and see that analysis without rebuilding it. The upload form lists JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, and AVIF. Tutorials and the FAQ are on the same site.
- Submit a picture. The form takes a file or a URL, in the formats the homepage lists. Read the FAQ before you upload someone else’s photo.
- What the analysis is for. The FAQ says the methods help show if a picture is a photograph or graphics, and if it was modified.
- Where it came from. The FAQ ties the approach to Krawetz’s 2007 talk and later versions of that briefing.
The copyright line is Hacker Factor, 2012–2026. There is no price on the pages this directory opened, and no public GitHub repository for the service. ExifTool is the neighboring tool when you want the metadata fields rather than a visual analysis. A FotoForensics result is an argument about the file. Someone still has to explain it.
- 1
Read the FAQ’s submission guidelines.
- 2
Upload a picture you are allowed to analyze, or pass a URL the form accepts.
- 3
Read the tutorial for the output you are looking at before you describe it in a report.
- 4
Keep the original file. The analysis is not a replacement for it.
Caveats
04
FotoForensics is a free website for error-level analysis and metadata display. Uploading sends the image to that service. Do not upload pictures you are not allowed to share.
ELA highlights compression differences. It does not prove who edited a photo or whether a scene is real. A phone screenshot of a photo is a new file. ExifTool on the original is the metadata source. The two tools will not match if you did not feed them the same bytes.
Screenshots
05
Potential use cases
06
- A photo in the case may have been edited and you can upload it under a policy that allows that upload. Submit it to FotoForensics and read the error-level analysis as the site presents it. The output is that visual, plus the metadata the site shows. Pivot to ExifTool on your own copy for the tags, which are a different question. ELA is not a forgery verdict. The site’s own documentation is the limit on what the colors mean.
- You are teaching the difference between metadata and a visual check. Run ExifTool locally and FotoForensics on a copy of a photo you are allowed to upload. The lesson is that they answer different questions and can disagree. Do not upload a confidential or a victim’s image to a public service to make the point. Use an example you can publish.
- Compare the site’s output with the tags ExifTool still sees. If FotoForensics shows little metadata and ExifTool shows GPS, believe the local read of the file you have, and note that the upload may have been a re-encoded copy. The pitfall is citing the website’s parse of a file you altered by saving it through a messenger first.
Hard cases
The case where the first result is easy to over-read.
The bright squares get called a fake
ELA shows blocks and someone writes ‘manipulated’ in the report. Stop. Read what the FotoForensics documentation says those patterns usually are, including ordinary resaves. Put the image in the file only if you can explain it, and pair it with ExifTool output from the same bytes. If you cannot explain the colors, the finding is ‘we ran ELA,’ not ‘the photo is fake.’
Questions
Is FotoForensics free?
Yes. The site this directory opened does not show a paid plan. You submit a picture in the browser.
Does FotoForensics prove a photo is fake?
No. The FAQ describes analysis methods that help a researcher judge edits. The conclusion is still yours to defend.
Citations
07
Titled sources. These public pages are what the quotes on this listing come from.
Product
FotoForensics
https://fotoforensics.com/Documentation
FotoForensics FAQ
https://fotoforensics.com/faq.php