If I have a suspicion that someone changed the date on their iPhone, took photos with that back-dated date and time, can I prove this? Or is this something that you just can't track?
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I assume the device is not under your control (while taking the photos and now too)? Then no, just from the photos there is no way to find evidence for clock tampering in the past. (And given Ios, even with control it won't be straightforward). – deviantfan Jun 17 '18 at 10:17
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Yeah the device is not under my control. I've never seen it. The only thing I have is the picture uploaded from the phone, and I was hoping to be able to decipher the 'true' original date just from the picture. – curioussuspicions Jun 17 '18 at 10:21
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There are traditional forensic techniques that can be used to get the approximate date, depending on what the photo is of (e.g. nature with plants in the photo, vs within an artificially-lit room). – forest Jun 17 '18 at 10:51
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Can you clarify how one would go about with these forensic techniques? One photograph is taken in the day (generic construction site/tall building). Another is a photograph taken in an artificially-lit room. – curioussuspicions Jun 17 '18 at 11:04
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No, you can't. If an image file has a timestamp in its metadata, that data can be edited even after the image was taken. It is called "Exif data", and there are editors available to do that. So you don't even need to think of this when taking the photo.
Changing Exif data leaves no traces in the file. So there is no way to prove that this kind of tampering took place.
The only way to prove that a photo was taken at a specific time is by looking at what's actually depicted in the image and see if there are any clues which hint at the date and time when the photo was taken. But as you know, thanks to the power of modern image manipulation software, there are also ways to tamper with the content of images.
Philipp
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