Izitru wants to help the internet determine if a picture is real or not

The Internet has a trust problem. It’s just too easy to fake a photo these days. A startup called Fourandsix hopes to profit by bringing some certainty to the situation with a new service called Izitru that can help verify the authenticity of photos. It won’t necessarily help you figure out if a photo shared on Facebook is too good to be true, but it can be used if you’re a photographer who just took a potentially viral picture and want people to know it’s real.

It’s not uncommon to see an image go viral — only to be called out for being fake. News organizations unknowingly published false images of Osama Bin Laden after his death, and there’s always the rounds of fake viral photos that are shared on Facebook and Twitter. To combat photo falsification, FourandSix technologies introduced izitru, a free photo verification app and website that uses six forensic tests to determine a file’s authenticity. It’s not just looking at the metadata, said FourandSix co-founder Kevin Conner. The tests look at everything from how the file was compressed to what camera was used to whether the file has been re-saved and manipulated. “Every device and every piece of software has a somewhat different way of storing their JPEG files,” Conner said. “The most significant way that things differ is in the compression settings that the devices use.”