is-this-photo-reallisted

# Is this photo real Verification order is the whole skill: **provenance first, pixels last.** Finding the earliest copy and reading its caption settles more cases than every forensic filter combined, and it produces evidence you can show someone. Pixel forensics produces a colourful heatmap and an argument. The beginner mistake is running error level analysis on a downloaded JPEG and announcing the image is fake. The second is looking for deepfakes: the overwhelming majority of deceptive media is **real footage with a false caption** — right pixels, wrong war, wrong year, wrong country. ## Triage: what question are you actually answering | The claim under test | Do this first | Not this | |---|---|---| | "This shows event X in place Y" | `find-the-original-image`, then `geolocate-from-pixels` | Any forensic filter. Recontextualisation leaves no pixel trace at all. | | "This is an unaltered photograph" | Signal-level analysis, on the least-processed copy you can obtain | Analysing a screenshot or a platform download; both destroy the signal. | | "This person said this on video" | Provenance, then audio-visual consistency, then face-boundary behaviour frame by frame | An AI-detector score. | | "This image was AI-generated" | Absent camera physics and incoherent object structure | A detector verdict on its own. | | "This screenshot is genuine" | Layout, font and interface-version consistency; the underlying record if one exists | Image forensics. Fabricated screenshots are