FINDING: MODI – Find where & when a photo was taken (geolocation & chronolocation)
21,239
Published 2021-05-10
I have chosen to use a case study of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as he visited troops near the India/China border in Ladakh.
The purpose for this tutorial is to answer questions that I received from my previous tutorials on shadow calculation, specifically relating to things such as, ‘what if I don’t know the height of the person’, or ‘does it have to be the exact location’, or more simply, ‘how can I geolocate an image using mountains in the background’. I hope this video answers those questions.
The techniques covered in this tutorial are:
- How to use Google Earth and Google Maps
- How to do an image reverse search
- How to find the location of an image without metadata
- How to analyse an image to find where it was taken
- How to find when a photo was taken using its shadows
- And how to find more images and videos of the same event
The skills and techniques are covered in-depth in alternative videos that I have provided as well, as it is my intention to provide as informative content as possible, to share these skills and techniques with the wider world of investigators, journalists, researchers and those with digitally curious minds.
Why are these methods useful? The skills and techniques seen here have a wide adaptation in many fields. Of course, the content I have done here is very simple, but is effective in its process as a walkthrough and tutorial and can be applied to numerous pieces of media, footage and material. Geolocating allows for a much wider spatial awareness of what’s happening in a place, area, country. Knowing when something occurred is equally important. Being able to combine those two together, with numerous pieces of geolocated and chronolocated footage, allows for an extremely detailed view as to what has happened on the ground, what someone has done in a given place at a given time, or to indicate trends of movement, change or events.
Simply put, identifying the time of media allows for more scrutiny of facts and events.
The best thing? You can do all of this from your couch.
If you enjoyed this video, you might find my YouTube channel useful. My name is Benjamin Strick, I am an open source investigator, and this channel is useful for those looking to find digital breadcrumbs and pick up some methods of open source intelligence (OSINT), digital investigations and good old plain research. No matter who you are, or where you are in the world, you can follow these tutorials from home with publicly available information to answer questions such as who, what, where and when.
TOOLS
Suncalc (with coordinates and time): www.suncalc.org/#/34.1999,77.3191,17/2020.07.03/09…
Google Maps: www.google.com/maps?entry=yt
Google Earth Pro: www.google.co.uk/earth/download/gep/agree.html
Google Image Reverse Search: www.google.com/imghp?hl=en
CASE STUDIES
Geolocation for beginners: • OSINT At Home #8 – Calculate time usi...
How to chronolocate an image using the shadows: • OSINT At Home #4 – Identify a locatio...
BBC Africa Eye – Anatomy of a Killing: • Anatomy of a Killing - BBC News
Forensic Architecture – Rafah – Shadow Analysis: • Rafah - Shadow Analysis
Bellingcat – An Execution in Hadrut: www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2020/10/15/a…
SUPPORT ME:
Please do consider supporting this content so I can create more and keep it free, independent and accessible to everyone in the world: ko-fi.com/bendobrown
MY SETUP:
Apple Macbook Pro 16-inch: amzn.to/3rTWhW3
Logitech MX Anywhere 2 mouse: amzn.to/3phQp7v
Blue Yeti USB microphone: amzn.to/3ajixmb
CREDITS FOR THIS TUTORIAL
Imagery: Google Earth/Landsat Copernicus
SunCalc.org ©Torsten Hoffmann 2015-2021
Mumbai Mirror: mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/news/india/photos-pm-m…
Asian News International: twitter.com/ANI/status/1279249501010759692?s=20
Music intro: Two Moons by Bobby Richards – with YouTube Audio Library License
Music End: Dhaka by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc…
Artist: incompetech.com/
All Comments (21)
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watched your whole playlist on OSINT and it completely changed the way i thought about OSINT earlier . Really great playlist i will refer it to all my friends , Love from INDIA
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Really appreciated going the extra distance on the second photo and repeating the process. I've shared this around to other practitioners, so thanks for sharing this content!
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I need to step up my video content game! Amazing
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Wow this is really really powerful tool
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Your videos is going to blow up soon, thanks to Modi.
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Epic man,... really cool
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High-quality content!
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Nice...! Yea, using clocks or wrist watches to derive the location...also nice..!
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Fantastic content!
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Love from India thanks for finding MODI lol
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Great content
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Thanks 🤙
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Now i am pretty sure,Modi is quite popular .
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Love from india , modi ji ❤️❤️❤️❤️
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Loved it man have ads , so we can contribute to you
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Hi Ben, is possible to tell the distance that the photo taken from, to a specific object in that photo?
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I love your content and the series gave me lot's of knowledge so far but i have this question. We were looking north in suncalc, but the image looks like it was taken pointing east so the shadow was actually south east in the actual image, isn't that can lead to false result..?
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Quality content.. Let me know topics of your future uploads
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Terrific. How do you get the original image to appear/disappear and float around on top of the Earth image?
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Hi Ben, really great content and useful! I have used similar methods for geolocating old family photos (before cell phones) and movie filming locations. One bit of criticism - you do a LOT of zooming, scrolling and mouse movements, which when viewed on a 27" monitor almost make you nauseous. But, thats just me.
