However, this massive flood of users immediately ate up his bandwidth budget. This was fine as long as it didn't cost him much to run it. The volume was so intense that it crashed his server.īut it was worse than that: Jeffrey said that he had been paying for bandwidth out of his own pocket. Those TikTokers had millions of followers, so his site was immediately slammed by users. He told me that at the beginning of May, a few TikTok celebrities (is that really a thing?) mentioned his service. I wrote to Jeffrey Friedl (creator of the site) and asked him about this outage. If you visit the site today, all you see is a plain-text response: 'Jeffrey's Exif Viewer is unavailable at the moment.' It's been saying that for over four months. (Since 2006!) But at the beginning of May this year, it suddenly went offline. Jeffrey's had been around for a very long time. It's a different niche market for a different use case.) (In contrast, FotoForensics includes metadata along with other kinds of analysis, but only works on pictures. It was so widely used in the forensics community, that you could just mention 'Jeffrey's' and people knew exactly what you were talking about.Īs an online service, Jeffrey's evaluated all kinds of files - not just pictures. This online service was very easy to use: upload and see the metadata. Jeffrey's Exif Viewer was a basic wrapper around ExifTool for metadata extraction. For this simple online 'upload and see results' approach, one of the best tools out there was called Jeffrey's Exif Viewer. The better tools just allow you to provide a file and see the metadata information. There are lots of tools for displaying metadata, but most are too technical for the average user. These kids knew that, hidden in the file, there might be helpful and informative information, just waiting to be discovered.

Check the metadata!' I don't know what picture they were looking at, but clearly the concept of metadata has reached critical mass. (Well, 'kids' may not be right they might have been in college, but they all look so young.) One of them said, 'Oh my Gawd! Is that real?' and the other immediately replied, 'I don't know. I was in the grocery store the other day and saw two young kids looking at a picture on a cellphone.

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