Vajba - Client-side image forensics for photo editing detection
Show HN: Is this photo edited? Client-side image forensics
Vajba's free Image Forensics tool lets you check any photo for signs of editing, AI generation, hidden metadata, and compression artifacts—all without uploading your file. It runs entirely in your browser, analyzing the file's own bytes to surface clues like Content Credentials, encoder signatures, and pixel statistics. You can drag and drop a photo, paste an image, or provide a URL. The tool cryptographically verifies C2PA signatures, inspects metadata, and provides a detailed report. It's perfect for journalists, researchers, or anyone who needs to assess an image's authenticity quickly and privately.
Every finding here comes from the file's own bytes, parsed in your browser. Your file is never uploaded.
- sebmellen
> Finds clues worth investigating, not proof that a photo is edited or authentic.
Isn’t this kind of Claudeslop something you could at least remove from the homepage of a product like this? What does this even tell me? Nothing! It tells me the person who created this site had no opinion about what it should actually do, and just let their LLM agent building something that vaguely fits their impression of what could be done to detect image tampering.
- matherial
I would caution against tools like this. The detection of vendor signatures for AI-generated images is legit, but I'd probably rely on vendor software for that.
Many other techniques here are more or less quack science with some sordid history. If I recall correctly, the entire field was invented by a guy of questionable integrity. Most of these methods are riffs on "if you download a badly compressed JPEG, paste some higher-quality content into it, and then save it at high quality setting and the same resolution, it's going to show if you run a highpass filter on the result". This is not wrong, but commonly fails on innocent images and it's also not how professional photo editing is done.
Tools that aren't this seem even more questionable. The "clone detector" triggers on anything that naturally shows even a bit of symmetry or repetition. The "noise comparison" tool detects bokeh and smooth surfaces. Etc.
TL;DR: Experiment with it, but don't assume that just because it sounds scientific, it actually works in real life.
- fortran77
I dropped an image that was color corrected with AI, but otherwise a proper image of myself. I use my own face because it's very easy to see if AI has altered it in a subtle way when dealing with a very familiar subject.
It found the "AI Generated" signature embedded in it by the creator (whatever image model Perplexity decided to use.)
But I wouldn't have called this image AI. So images that have merely been color corrected or other very minor changes may come up as "AI Generated" even if they're essentially real images.