How To Tell If A JPG Image Has Been Photoshopped (Windows)

I have previously covered how to delete the extra information (meta data) that gets attached to your images. Now I will be showing you how to use another nifty portable tool to see if the image is photoshopped (or edited using some other photo editor).

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to point out that we will not be able to differentiate between a small edit and a BIG edit. We can tell if an image HAS been edited from its original file but not by how much or what.

So if you are trying to tell if Suzy O’s picture is legit you can use JpegSnoop to see if the picture has been altered or it is still in its original form (when it was taken by a digital camera). But you will not be able to tell if Suzy added a border to the image after the shot was taken if it was modified any more than that.

Am I making sense? You can see if it was edited but not how much.

Let’s take a look at the program!

First you should download the 532KB zip file containing the 1.3MB executable file from the author’s home page, Impulse Adventure.

Like I said before, it is portable and does not have to be installed. I ran it and this is what I saw:

This is not an installer, just an license agreement and a check box to automatically check for updates. I believe these settings are saved somewhere as the second time I opened JPEGsnoop it did not give me this window or options. After that you can change your update preferences within the program’s configuration.

Check the “I have read the terms” box and click OK. Then you will be show the program’s main window as you can see below:

I immediately grabbed a digital picture I had modified and opened it up with JPEGsnoop. It was a 7KB JPG file with image modifications. I got this note that said it only scans in a low res version of the image and it will be fast. You have the option to open the file as is but it will take longer. Either which way click OK and move on.

I was instantly shown my images’ details as you can see below:

There is so much information included in the final report.  The middle of the report was removed due to space limitations you can grab the whole report as a txt file here: report.

The last paragraph is what you are looking for though – It is titled “Assessment”. Here it says “Image is processed/edited”. And directly above that you can find out what program was used to edit this image. Is it full proof? Hell no! But it is better than having no scientific basis for your picture assumptions! Do you use a similar tool? Let us know your favorite JPG analyzer program in the comments.

Also maybe you want to point us to some JPG’s on the web and see if we can figure out if the images are photoshopped or original?