Have been subjected to forwarded emails which contains emails of ghosts? But hey, you can’t tell if that forwarded image is a real picture taken by a camera, or work of a Photoshop genius who had more time on his hands than his work permitted.

Like we said, most of those forwarded images are usually fakes and you can’t really tell just by looking at a particular image, whether it is indeed real or fake, to get rid of our confusion, a handy and useful software called JPEGsnoop will tell you whether a image has been edited by someone, or its a real photograph taken by a camera.

Every digital photo contains a wealth of hidden information — JPEGsnoop was written to expose these details to those who are curious.

Not only can one determine the various settings that were used in the digital camera in taking the photo (EXIF metadata, IPTC), but one can also extract information that indicates the quality and nature of the JPEG image compression used by the camera in saving the file. Each digital cameras specifies a compression quality levels, many of them wildly different, leading to the fact that some cameras produce far better JPEG images than others.

To test if JPEGsnoop indeed works as advertised, we ran it through a series of test, first opening a Photoshop edited image, and then opening a original image taken with a Canon A710 camera, and the results were accurate to the hilt.

JPEGsnoop Analysis for Photoshop Image

JPEGsnoop Analysis for Original Image Taken by Canon A710

Considering our test results, we were pretty impressed by the output and would definitely suggest this software to anyone who wants to separate the fake images from original images.

JPEGsnoop supports decoding .JPG files and can also decode embedded images in .THM, .AVI, .DNG, .CRW, .CR2, .NEF, .ORF, .PEF, .MOV and .PDF ^[1] files. JPEGsnoop is a portable software ^[2].

Download JPEGsnoop ^[3]